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A BRIEF INTRODUCTION 



TO 



MODERN PHILOSOPHY 



ARTHUR KENYON ROGERS, Ph.D. 



L .1 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1899 

A// rights reserved 

* • 



THE LIBRARY] 

OF C ONGR ESS I 

WASHlNqrOHJ 



Copyright, 1899, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

TVlOCOPico 




U 6 1899" ] 



NorfajooB i3«B» 

J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 

Norwood Masa. U.S.A. 






PREFACE 

The following pages have been written 
with a definite aim in view. This aim has 
been, in as untechnical a way as possible, 
and with as little presupposition of pre- 
vious philosophical training, to show how 
the problems of philosophy, which are apt 
to seem to the student on his first intro- 
duction to them rather arbitrary and un- 
intelligible, and with no very apparent 
relation to the concrete interests of life, 
in reality are not manufactured problems, 
but arise of necessity out of any attempt 
honestly to understand the world, and to 
appreciate the value which belongs to 
human experience. A book with this aim 
requires to be comparatively brief, and to 
confine itself to the essential and typical 
points of view, in order to avoid confusing 
the reader ; it must come back continually 



vi Preface 

to everyday beliefs and interests, and show 
the real meaning of philosophy in terms 
of these; and it must possess sufficient 
definiteness of treatment to convey a uni- 
fied impression, and not to leave behind 
the feeling of having been engaged with a 
number of interesting, but not very closely 
connected, problems. There are several 
excellent and well-known introductions to 
philosophy, but none of them, I believe, 
exactly covers the ground just outlined. 
That there is room for another attempt I 
think teachers generally will admit, though 
I am far from being sure that I have been 
able to meet the need. 

While, however, I have tried to state the 
problems as simply as they will admit of 
being stated, I do not profess that philoso- 
phy has thereby been rendered easy. No 
one can be a philosopher who is not will- 
ing to think, and to think hard, on his own 
account; no book or teacher can perform 
the operation for him. Any one who comes 
to the study must be presumed to have his 
powers more or less matured, and he must 
expect to be obliged to use them to the 



Preface vii 

uttermost. Nevertheless, philosophy has 
evolved for itself a technicality in stand- 
point and phraseology which certainly ad- 
mits of simplification, and many of the 
more or less artificial difficulties confront- 
ing the beginner, which grow out of this, 
may be removed without any real loss. 

Perhaps an excuse should be made for 
the positive character of the conclusions 
which are here set forth. I certainly do 
not wish to appear dogmatic, or to claim 
for my opinions any greater value than 
they possess. But it has seemed to me 
that the danger of leaving too strong an 
impression of the authoritative nature of 
the particular conclusions advanced is more 
than counterbalanced by the opposite dan- 
ger, in case one tries to be too objective in 
his tone, of leaving no unified impression 
at all. An introductory treatment of philo- 
sophical problems which does not lead up 
to positive and constructive results is apt, 
I think, to be unsatisfactory, especially to 
the reader who has no previous acquaint- 
ance with the subject, and whose interest 
has to a considerable extent still to be 



viii Preface 

aroused. The real end at which such a 
book should aim is undoubtedly the under- 
standing of problems, but this end may 
be best attained by bringing to bear upon 
the problems some definite point of view. 
Then whether the student accepts the 
particular solution or not, he has at least 
a well-defined starting-point for his own 
inquiry. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction 3 

Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism . 23 

Materialism and Subjective Idealism . 61 

Rationalism and Sensationalism . . 87 

Kant 129 

Hegel 159 

Agnosticism and the Theory of Know- 
ledge 221 

Theistic Idealism 267 

Scepticism and the Criterion of Truth 315 

ix 



INTRODUCTION 



INTRODUCTION 




O man who is able to learn from 
experience at all, can live very 
long in the world without find- 
ing himself continually passing judgment, 
in one way or another, on the meaning 
and the value of life. At the very least 
there will be some things which it will 
seem to him to be worth the while to do, 
and other things, again, which will fail to 
interest him, and which by implication 
therefore he will condemn ; but besides 
such fragmentary and instinctive judg- 
ments, he also, if he reflects at all, can 
hardly help but ask himself at times 
whether life has not some meaning as 
a whole, which would serve to throw light 
on the scattered and chaotic fragments of 
his everyday experience, and bring them 
3 



4 Introduction 

into some degree of unity. Now philoso- 
phy, apart from technicalities of definition, 
is nothing but an attempt, in a reasoned 
and comm-ehensive way, to answer this 
question, /What is the meaning of life }) 
Every one, therefore, in so far as he 
adopts a certain general attitude towards 
the problems that meet him, looks at them 
from a certain point of view, and does not 
simply let himself drift from one experi- 
ence to another without any purpose or 
unity to connect them, is taking the stand- 
point of philosophy. Such an attitude we 
call his philosophy of life, and if he is 
more or less clearly conscious of what this 
attitude is, and is able to express it in a 
unified and consistent way, we say in a 
popular sense that he is a philosopher. 
Technical philosophy differs from this 
only in the fact that it tries to do 
thoroughly, and in full consciousness of 
itself, what in popular thinking we do in 
a loose and unsystematic fashion. Instead 
of picking out those factors in life which 



Introduction 5 

appeal to us more personally and directly, 
it tries to set individual prejudices and 
limitations aside, and to include, as impar- 
tially as it can, all the elements which ex- 
perience presents. It is true that in doing 
this it frequently gets far enough from 
what seem to be living interests ; but back 
of all technical discussions, there is still 
the underlying conviction that by this 
path, and this alone, can we get at the 
vital and essential meaning of the world, 
or else we have no longer philosophy, but 
mere pedantry and hair-splitting. It is 
natural, then, that we should find the defi- 
nitions which men have given of philoso- 
phy at different times are not by any 
means the same. They are not the same 
because, under different circumstances, 
men's interests are directed to different 
points, now to the importance of conduct, 
now to the nature of the external world, 
now to the existence of supersensible reali- 
ties. But to say that their interest lies at 
one point or another, is only to say in 



6 Introduction 

other words that here they find the value 
of life ; this is the test that can always be 
applied, the real motive, if not the appar- 
ent one. So we can speak of the philoso- 
phy of any pursuit whatever in which men 
can engage, or of any subject which can 
occupy them, of science, of history, of 
the technical arts. Between science and 
the philosophy of science, history and the 
philosophy of history, there is indeed no 
hard and fast separation ; but what in the 
one case we are specially concerned with 
is the positive nature and the laws of a 
certain group of facts, which have been 
selected out from the rest of the world to 
be studied by themselves, while in the 
other we restore that connection with the 
whole which for the time being we had set 
aside, and try to look at our facts in the 
light of the meaning which they have for 
life in its entirety. 

Even when it is stated in this prelimi- 
nary way, the definition which has been 
given of philosophy will be seen to have 



Introduction 7 

a bearing on the disputes which have been 
common about the vakie of the study, and 
the very unequal estimation in which it 
has been held. There are many people 
to whom the pursuit of philosophy has 
seemed to be, at best, of very doubtful 
utility. Sometimes it is one who, like 
Matthew Arnold, is so impressed with the 
roncrete values of art and conduct that 
the world of the philosopher seems to 
him abstract and barren in comparison. 
More often it is the man of science, who 
feels that he has got hold of reality so im- 
mediately and palpably in the world of 
matter, and of reality which is so far- 
reaching in its significance, that he has no 
interest left to give the supersensuous and 
very doubtful world which he understands 
that philosophy is trying to construct by 
merely thinking about it. Now the an- 
swer to be made the scientist is this, that 
he is not getting along without philosophy, 
as he supposes, but only is adopting one 
particular kind of philosophy, whose im- 



8 Introduction 

plications, however, he does not try to 
understand. And he can hardly hold that 
this refusal to examine into the presuppo- 
sitions of his thinking is, in opposition to 
the metaphysician's course, a highly meri- 
torious thing, without stultifying his whole 
scientific procedure. He may, indeed, as 
a scientist, merely devote himself to the 
discovery of facts ; but unless he is pre-* 
pared to say that the bare objective fact is 
everything, and its meaning, its value for 
us, is nothing (which is very like a con- 
tradiction in terms), he cannot avoid en- 
croaching on the philosopher's field. In 
reality he always does bring with him his 
own interpretation of the facts of science, 
and they differentiate the way in which he 
looks at the world from the way in which 
other men look at it; the only ques- 
tion is as to whether this should be con- 
scious and thoroughgoing, or whether it 
should be unconscious, and unaware of 
the possible difficulties that may be in- 
volved. In any case the mere facts of the 



Introduction 9 

objective world, as objective, cannot ex- 
haust the problems which arise, and arise 
necessarily, for this external world would 
not exist, for us, if it did not have a value 
as coming within our conscious life, and 
so it forms but a part of experience, not 
the whole. Whatever it may be in itself, 
for human interest at least the objective 
fact or law as such cannot possibly be a 
final and sufficient goal. Even the man 
who thinks that it is so, must have some 
reason why the search for objective truth 
appeals to him; its simple existence in 
itself does not explain why he should want 
to know it. It may of course be that, in 
the end, one might be driven to admit that 
no vital relation to human life could be 
discovered ; in that case science at once 
would cease to be pursued. But answera- 
ble or not, at least it cannot be said that 
when the problems go beyond mere scien- 
tific matter of fact they cease to have any 
interest for us ; knowing the chemical com- 
position of water will not satisfy us in face 



10 ' Introduction 

of the larger question, What is this world 
of which our lives form a part ? what is 
its meaning and destiny ? And it is 
through philosophy, not through science, 
that this latter question must receive an 
answer, if it is answered at all. 

Nevertheless there is some justifica- 
tion for this contemptuous attitude which 
science is apt to adopt towards philoso- 
phy, and which grows out of the true 
feeling that any value which is really 
worth our consideration must attach to 
the actual world in which we live, not to 
some far-away abstract world, which only 
can be got at by the occasional philoso- 
pher, and through the colorless medium 
of thought. What we are after is the 
meaning of life as we live it, and if we 
come out at the end with something that 
finds no place for the concrete values with 
which we are familiar, then certainly a 
large factor in the problem has without 
any justification been juggled out of sight. 
So that we have to insist, in the second 



Introduction 1 1 

place, that the data which the philosopher 
uses are not something which, by a pure 
act of intellectual creation, he spins out 
of his own head, but the same facts with 
which science, and history, and everyday 
living, deal. In this sense, therefore, the 
philosopher is dependent on the scientist ; 
he cannot go his own way and construct 
his world a priori, but he must continually 
be falling back upon the concrete know- 
ledge which science represents. So, also, 
philosophy does not "give us God, free- 
dom, immortality," if by this we mean 
that it somehow puts us in possession of 
values which we had not before suspected. 
Religion, morality, the social life, all come 
before philosophy, and are presupposed 
by it; and philosophy, in turn, in so far 
as it is only a bare recognition of truths, 
and not a vital appreciation of them, in 
so far as it stops with itself as mere 
knowing, and does not hand back the 
material which it has been elaborating 
intellectually, to the immediate experience 



12 Introduction 

in which this originated, is forgetting its 
place as the handmaid of life, and so is 
rendering itself barren and formal. All 
that philosophy can do is to take the 
actual values which come to us in ex- 
perience, work out their implications and 
their mutual relationships, and, it may- 
be, get at some unitary point of view, 
from which each element can be looked 
at, and have full justice done it. But by 
this very process it will be making a 
positive addition to the value of experi- 
ence itself, not by creating truths which 
are entirely new, but by clearing up and 
throwing new light upon the meaning 
which already has been present in our 
lives, and so making it more real to us. 
And this will also serve to indicate 
the answer to a very common complaint 
against philosophy, in which it is set 
over against feeling, as something quite 
opposed. It is common to hear people 
say, After all, it is feeling truth, not 
reasoning about it, which is the impor- 



Introduction 13 

tant thing ; and philosophy, by translating 
everything over into the cold and imper- 
sonal medium of thought, and by intro- 
ducing all sorts of doubts and limitations, 
is a foe to that immediate enjoyment 
of truth which alone is worth the having. 
Whether this is true or not depends 
entirely on what we mean by it. If we 
mean by feeling unintelligent, blind feel- 
ing, just the mere confused sense of satis- 
faction, it is not true at all. But this is 
not what we mean when we speak of 
feeling as it is aroused by poetry or art: 
that is equivalent rather to insight, in- 
telligent appreciation. It is, therefore, not 
something which is opposed to reason, 
but its highest, most immediate exercise. 
But here again we shall be doing an 
injustice if we oppose immediacy too 
sharply to the more laborious and reflec- 
tive work of thought. It is not philoso- 
phy which comes in to spoil the fineness 
of the enjoyment we get in immediate 
feeling, but it is the fact that feeling 



14 Introduction 

breaks down, and will no longer satisfy 
us, that compels us to betake ourselves 
to thought. Feelings are sure to clash, 
and then they possess no criterion within 
themselves which shall say whether this 
feeling or that one is the truer; merely 
as feeling they cannot tell us whether 
they are valid objectively, or whether we 
are only deluding ourselves with subjec- 
tive emotions. To compare their values, 
and to bring them to the test of their 
consonancy with the whole of life, thought 
is needed; but that does not mean that 
we pass from immediate experience to 
something higher, thought ; it means that, 
through thought, we get from an imme- 
diacy which is limited and partial, to 
one which is truer, richer, and more 
inclusive. 

Now systems of philosophy are simply 
attempts to get at a unified way of look- 
ing at things, and in the following pages 
we shall have to consider how such sys- 
tems have grown up, and what are the 



Introduction 1 5 

particular problems they have set them- 
selves to solve. And in a general way 
we may say that they all of them have 
to do with a few very simple-looking 
assumptions, which every one is accus- 
tomed to make, and which are so natural 
that when our attention is first called to 
them we hardly see how anybody can be 
so foolish as to bring them into ques- 
tion. We all feel very sure, that is, that 
out there in space a lot of things exist, 
— trees, stones, houses, — which we know 
are there because we see them when we 
open our eyes, and touch them when 
we stretch out our hands. To be sure, 
we are not looking at them all the time, 
but that makes no difference to the things 
themselves; they still are there, whether 
we see them or not. Then again we are 
sure that we ourselves exist. If we were 
asked to define this " self," we might 
indeed have difficulty in determining just 
in what it consisted, but in general it is 
that which thinks and feels, has sensa- 



16 Introduction 

tions and desires, and acts according to 
conscious purposes, none of which attri- 
butes are we ready to suppose belong to 
things in the external world. Finally, it 
is not only my own self that I believe 
in, but I am just as firmly convinced 
of the existence of other selves, with 
whom I am continually in communication. 
These three assumptions it never enters 
into the head of the ordinary man to 
doubt. 

Now in these beliefs, on which every 
one, including the philosopher himself, 
continually is acting, there are involved 
the various problems of philosophy, even 
the most abstract. This world of men 
and things which we assume seems clear 
and unambiguous in its nature only so 
long as we refrain from thinking about 
it; a very little consideration shows the 
necessity of defining more exactly in 
what the reality of these things consists, 
how they are to be thought. In so far 
as philosophy has this problem, of deter- 



Introduction 1 7 

mining the true nature of the real, it is 
called Ontology. If we start by assuming 
the separation between mind and matter, 
we must ask precisely what it is we 
mean by these two terms, and then the 
more they seem to differ from and exclude 
each other, the more insistent becomes 
the problem as to how that still more 
basal form of reality is to be conceived, 
which shall restore the unity of which 
philosophy is in search. But things not 
only exist, they have a history ; and 
this brings us into still more evident 
contact with the practical values of ex- 
perience. For any inquiry into the laws 
which govern the history of the material 
world, into the nature and connection 
of the world processes, raises at once 
and inevitably the question, what relation 
these have to our own conscious lives 
and purposes, whether they are mechani- 
cal merely, and indifferent to human 
interests, or whether something in the 
nature of meaning and aim can be de- 



18 Introduction 

tected in them. This in general is the 
field of Cosmology. But now the fact 
that we started with individuals more or 
less distinct from the world, gives rise 
to a third set of problems. It is soon 
apparent that we cannot talk about the 
nature of reality, without also giving 
some account of the source from which 
we get our knowledge, a problem which 
again becomes more difficult, the more 
we insist upon the separation between 
the knower and the object which is 
known. An answer to this question. 
What is the nature of knowledge .'' or 
How is knowledge possible .'* constitutes 
Epistemology. 

Of course it would be a mistake to 
suppose that these three provinces of 
philosophy deal with problems that are 
in any strict sense distinct ; in reality it 
is all the while a single problem which 
we are approaching from different sides. 
That problem is, to get some way of 
looking at things as a whole, some 



Introduction 19 

unitary conception which shall find a 
place for the actual facts of life, and by 
reference to which we may have some 
reasonable ground for believing that these 
facts possess real validity and worth. 
Philosophical systems are simply the most 
general points of view from which this 
unity has been sought. What we shall 
attempt, then, in the following pages, 
will be to consider some of the reasons 
for, and some of the objections to, those 
general standpoints which differentiate 
one philosophical system from another, 
and to show how they are connected 
with and grow out of one another. We 
shall deal, that is, with what perhaps 
may best be called Metaphysics, without 
attempting to say much about the more 
detailed problems of the special philo- 
sophical disciplines, — Ethics, Psychology, 
Logic, and the like. Metaphysics can, 
indeed, only receive body and content as it 
is worked out into these details, and the 
latter may frequently be decisive in lead- 



20 Introduction 

ing us to one standpoint rather than 
another. But nevertheless this general 
standpoint is a perfectly definite thing, 
which, consciously or unconsciously, af- 
fects profoundly the treatment of special 
problems; and logically it precedes the 
latter, as the presupposition under which 
the data for their solution take shape. 
It is, therefore, extremely important for 
us, even as psychologists and logicians, 
to understand the nature of these pre- 
suppositions, and not to let them remain 
hidden and unclarified, in which case they 
are likely to confuse both ourselves and 
others. The task of clarifying them is 
what philosophy, as general philosophy, 
or Metaphysics, undertakes to perform. 



DUALISM, PANTHEISM, AND 
THEISM 




DUALISM, PANTHEISM, AND 
THEISM 

JHE problems which commonly 
fall under the head of Meta- 
physics are practically bound 
up in this one comprehensive question, 
What is the fundamental nature of 
reality, of the universe in which we are 
placed ? for such a question is essen- 
tially involved in any attempt to deter- 
mine what our relations to the world are, 
either in the way of knowledge or of 
action. However much metaphysical in- 
quiries may seem to lead from the region 
of concrete interests, yet it is evident 
we cannot proceed very far towards the 
understanding of any fact of experience, 
until this question has found some sort 
of answer, if not as an explicit theory, 
23 



24 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

at least as an unformulated attitude 
towards life, which governs our think- 
ing without our being conscious of it. 

In so far as men are able to live 
simply and unreflectively, we have no 
reason to suppose that life presents to 
them any of those antitheses and dual- 
isms into which it is split up for more 
reflective minds, and which give phi- 
losophy its excuse for being. Much the 
same thing is true, probably, in the case 
of the child. Life for him is harmoni- 
ous and a whole; the external world 
enters into his experience simply as an 
instrument for carrying out what he 
wants to do, and so long as he is able 
thus to satisfy approximately his inter- 
ests and desires, there is no need that 
he should puzzle himself any further 
about the nature of the things which 
form a part of his life ; their existence 
is summed up for him in the service 
they perform. But this active realiza- 
tion of the unity of life does not long 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 25 

remain unbroken. As soon as we are 
forced by the failure of immediate satis- 
faction into the attitude of thinking about 
the world, a host of opposing elements 
at once arise. We think, indeed, for the 
purpose ultimately of bringing things into 
harmony, but the immediate result of 
thought is to set up on a basis of its 
own what had not previously called any 
direct attention to itself, and to mark it 
off from the rest of experience in order 
to examine it better, as if it had a de- 
gree of independence. The most funda- 
mental of these distinctions which thought 
introduces into experience is that between 
the external world of matter and the con- 
scious self. Modern philosophy, in agree- 
ment here with our ordinary common-sense 
judgments, starts in with Descartes by ac- 
cepting the dualism, and thus the nature 
of the problems with which it has at first 
to occupy itself is already determined. 

There are two questions at least which, 
on such an assumption, will evidently 



26 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

need to be answered. How, in the first 
place, shall we define these two differ- 
ent sorts of reality, mind and matter ? 
what is the precise nature of each, and 
the peculiarity which distinguishes it 
from the other? And then, after this is 
answered, What is the relation between 
them, the nature of the connection 
which, in spite of their difference, makes 
them, after all, elements in a single 
world ? Both these questions may for 
the present be considered somewhat 
briefly. 

At first glance it would not seem to 
be a very difficult matter to tell what 
it is we mean by a "thing"; we have 
only to point to this or that thing, a 
stone, or a tree, or a man, and our 
meaning, we think, is sufficiently clear 
without the need of further explanation. 
But philosophy has to justify its mean- 
ings in terms of thought, and it is 
much easier to recognize a thing prac- 
tically, than to define in what its thing- 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 27 

hood consists. On the one hand we 
meet with that characteristic which, as 
far back as the times of the early 
Greeks, aroused men's curiosity about 
the world, and proved the first spur to 
inquiry that can properly be called phil- 
osophic, — the universal flux of things, 
whereby they pass almost continuously 
one into another, and, in the shifting 
play of elements which results, no trace 
of an abiding reality remains, and no 
boundaries can be fixed which are not 
to a greater or less degree arbitrary 
and uncertain. How can we speak of 
a thing as the ''same," when every- 
thing that we know is undergoing a 
constant process of change } Or, if we 
turn away from this continual process 
of transformation, and take some one 
point in the history of any so-called 
thing, the unity begins to disappear in 
another way. About any such "thing" 
it is possible to make a great variety 
of statements : the stone is hard, and 



28 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

round, and smooth, and white, and so 
we may go on indefinitely; and as re- 
gards all these qualities, we think we 
know pretty much what we mean. But 
now when we are finished, apparently 
all that is left on our hands is a mass 
of different qualities, while the stone 
itself, the unity which binds them all 
together into the one thing, has dis- 
appeared from view. 

It is evident, however, that what we 
mean by a stone is not simply and 
solely a list of qualities, hardness and 
shape and color, but a something which 
is hard and round and white. Back, 
that is, of all the separate qualities that 
may be enumerated, we tend to set up 
an entity of some sort which binds 
these qualities together, and in which as 
a unity they inhere. This philosophical 
\ conception of an underlying substratum, 
or substance, of which the different 
qualities are only phenomenal manifes- 
tations, has passed into our current 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 29 

ways of thinking so completely that it 
seems a tolerably clear and definite 
notion. We go to work in precisely 
the same way when we come to deal 
with consciousness. If we try to ana- 
lyze the self and define what it is, all 
that we seem able to lay hold of defi- 
nitely, in the way of solid and verifiable 
fact, is a lot of particular sensations, 
particular desires, particular feelings, 
while the unity, as the philosopher 
Hume clearly pointed out, has a way 
of slipping through our fingers. But 
we all feel that the self is a single self, 
not a mere collection of particular con- 
scious states or acts. Accordingly, just 
as we place behind the group of quali- 
ties a substance to which they belong, 
so behind the particular elements of con- 
sciousness we place a unitary soul, an 
undefinable substratum with various fac- 
ulties, which has feelings and sensations, 
performs acts, but which is more funda- 
mental than any conscious process, or 



30 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

collection of conscious processes, which 
manifests it. 

It will not be necessary here to dwell 
very long upon the details of the prob- 
lems which have thus been started; it 
is enough to understand what the con- 
ception is, and what in a general way 
is the nature of the complications to 
which it gives rise. It is easy to see 
that such a notion of reality as is in- 
volved in the conception of substance, 
and of soul, is extremely abstract, that 
it makes reality fixed and static, and 
that it puts the essence of things in a 
sphere which is quite inaccessible to 
human knowledge ; and the consequence 
of this is, that the conception is unable 
to perform the service which it was de- 
signed for. Whatever may seem to be 
the necessity of holding to the notion 
of substance, it was already seen by 
Locke that, as regards the nature of 
substance, what substance is, we are in- 
capable of forming the slightest idea. 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 31 

For, of course, if we strip it of all sensi- 
ble qualities, there are no terms left by 
which to characterize it. Since we re- 
quire it in order to get qualities to form 
a unity, we cannot define it in terms of 
other qualities, and there is nothing we 
can say of it except that it is a unity 
of the qualities. But this is purely an 
abstraction, the mere idea of unity, and 
does not tell at all in what, concretely, 
the unity consists ; it is the demand we 
set out with put down as its own solu- 
tion. And being abstract, it is unable 
to perform its work of uniting things ; 
if it could, we should never have had 
the problem in the first place. We can- 
not leave it, however, as the mere ab- 
straction of unity; that is much too 
elusive an idea to satisfy us. So what 
we do practically is to take up again 
with that uncritical notion of a "thing" 
which we set* out to define, and to com- 
bine the notion of abstract unity with 
this. Substance thus appears as a par- 



32 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

ticular "something" lying- back of its 
qualities and manifestations, and sepa- 
rate from them ; we still continue, that 
is, to apply to it the general category 
of a thing, while yet every mark of 
what we empirically know as things has 
been stripped from it. But by thus set- 
ting it off over against its qualities as a 
distinct something, a new difficulty has 
been added; it no longer is necessary 
to explain simply the relation of the 
qualities to one another^ but there is also 
their relation to the substance, to be 
accounted for; and the old difficulties, 
moreover, are still as great as ever. In 
so far as the substance is in any sense 
a reality back of, and apart from, its 
phenomenal appearances, another and a 
separate fact, which, as it can exist with- 
out this or that quality, might conceiv- 
ably exist without them all, it furnishes 
not the shadow of an explanation, prac- 
tically, for the actual qualities and phe- 
nomena with which in the real world 



Dualism^ Pantheism, and Theism 33 

we are dealing, and which we are trying 
to account for; while we have, in addi- 
tion, that anomaly of a substance of 
which nothing can be predicated which 
makes its existence, as a distinct some- 
thing, conceivable. And, finally, what is 
closely connected with this, from another 
standpoint, is the relation of substance 
to change. What we are after in the 
concept of substance is that which is 
identical with itself, the solid and per- 
manent core of reality. But by mark- 
ing off the permanent and identical 
element as separate, and making it the 
fundamental fact of reality, we cease to 
be able to bring it, for purposes of ex- 
planation, into connection with the world 
of change. If the substance is the basis 
of, and therefore, in a way, more real 
than, its changing manifestations, these 
latter have to be derived from it; but 
the very insistence upon its permanence 
and lack of change makes the deriva- 
tion very difficult, to say the least. 



34 Dualism,' Pantheism, and Theism 

When we turn from the nature of 
mind and matter in themselves, to the 
relation that exists between them, a new 
set of problems arises. Without asking 
now what substance is as such, we may be 
satisfied to define any particular substance 
by the manner in which it expresses it- 
self, its most essential characteristics. 
And, in a popular way, it is sufficiently 
exact to say that matter is character- 
ized by extension, and by impenetrability 
or hardness, while the peculiar charac- 
teristic of the soul is consciousness, — 
thought, sensation, and the like. It is 
in this way, namely, that ordinary thought 
is accustomed to distinguish between mind 
and matter. So far, then, as all the 
marks which characterize them are con- 
cerned, mind and matter are on the face 
of it utterly different. Mind is never 
extended, matter is never conscious ; 
what the one is, the other is not. Ac- 
cordingly, when we ask how it comes 
about that one can exert an influence 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 35 

on the other, as, in connection with the 
activities of the human body, they cer- 
tainly seem to do, the imagination finds 
it hard to picture any way in which 
this interaction can be effected. On the 
whole it seems fairly natural that one 
body should set another in motion, be- 
cause the nature of both of them is 
essentially spatial ; but when we are told 
of a motion effected by a thought, which 
is so very different from motion, we are 
apt to find the process much more puz- 
zling. 

When the objection is put like this, 
in the form of a difficulty as to just what 
sort of a thing we are to conceive that 
connection between mind and body to 
be, which is involved in the idea of in- 
teraction, it is not very hard to show 
that it fails to be conclusive. It will 
appear later on that the supposed sim- 
plicity of the idea of interaction between 
two substances of the same kind is, after 
all, more apparent than real. When it 



36 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

comes to representing to oneself the 
nature of the connection, an interaction 
between two bodies is just as difficult to 
understand as one between a body and 
a soul; and, consequently, we cannot 
reject the latter simply because we do 
not see how it is done. There is, 
indeed, still a reason, apart from the 
metaphysical one, why an influence of 
consciousness upon matter is not so 
easily to be admitted as the influence 
of one body on another. It is the work- 
ing hypothesis of scientific inquiry, based 
not so much on any a priori probabilities 
as on the actual success which has at- 
tended science in the past, that every 
event in the material world can be suf- 
ficiently accounted for on purely physi- 
cal grounds; and this has been greatly 
strengthened in later years through the 
discovery of the very exact equivalency 
between the amounts of energy repre- 
sented in the various stages of a physical 
process, and by the consequent formula- 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 37 

tion of the important Law of the Con- 
servation of Energy, according to which 
the energy expended in producing any 
physical result is not lost, but only 
changes its form, so that the sum total 
of energy is never either increased or 
diminished. It is clear that, if this law 
is strictly true, the activities of the 
human body, like any other physical 
event, must have their complete explana- 
tion in the physical world, and cannot 
be due to the influence of an extra-physi- 
cal fact like consciousness; and while it 
is out of the question to think of demon- 
strating the law in every possible case, 
yet its great apparent validity wher- 
ever it can be tested, and its almost uni- 
versal acceptance by men of science, make 
the existence of a mutual influence be- 
tween mind and body at least a matter 
for further inquiry. The problem which 
is involved in this, however, need not 
be considered now. Granting that the 
fact of consciousness has some influence 



38 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

in determining the movements of the 
body, what is apparent is, that, if we 
are to make the idea of interaction tena- 
ble, we shall require more than the ex- 
istence of two separate things, whether 
it be two bodies, or a body and a soul. 
Any two things which are taken to 
start with as separate from each other, 
necessarily require some larger concep- 
tion if they are to be brought into rela- 
tion, for a relation implies that, after all, 
they do come within some kind of a 
unity, and so that the notion of them 
severally in their separateness is inade- 
quate to meet the situation. If they 
were utterly separate in very deed, 
neither of them could be anything what- 
ever to the other. If, then, we retain 
the distinction between mind and matter 
with which we set out, we find it neces- 
sary to hunt for some larger and more 
fundamental reality back of the finite 
existences we started with, or else give 
up the hope of finding any unity in the 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 39 

world. Such a search may take either 
one of two directions, which in a rough 
way may be called the theistic, and the 
pantheistic, respectively. We may look 
on individual bodies and souls as brought 
into being, created, by a reality which 
thus exists distinct from them, and whose 
creative power serves as the explana- 
tion of their interactions; or we may 
take these individual things as them- 
selves expressions of, elements in, the 
total reality of the world ground, which, 
accordingly, does not give them a sepa- 
rate substantiality, but has its own being 
wholly summed up in them. This last 
conception will be considered first. 

The term Pantheism is one which is 
used so popularly and loosely, that it is 
especially necessary to make clear to our- 
selves just the form of theory we intend to 
express by it. It might stand for a num- 
ber of distinguishable views, though these 
of course shade into one another. In gen- 
eral, a theory would not be called panthe- 



40 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

ism, or monism, which gave to finite 
things, whether bodies or conscious selves, 
any degree of substantial independence. 
Nevertheless there is a constant tendency, 
in a pantheistic scheme of things, to set 
off the unitary Being, after all, from the 
finite and changing world, but to cover 
up the inconsistency by making this latter 
phenomenal, and consequently something 
less than real. So here is a chance for 
ambiguity to be noticed at the start ; is the 
one Being which is to serve as the unity 
of the world to be regarded as an unknown 
something back of phenomena, or as itself 
exhausted in them } On the one hand, if 
God is all, then finite things must evidently 
be a part of God, for there is no room for 
them outside of him. If, however, we take 
God simply as the sum of finite manifes- 
tations, we are only deceiving ourselves in 
supposing we have attained a unity. For, 
on the face of them, things are separate 
and distinct, and especially is this so in the 
case of consciousness and the external 



Dualism y Pantheism, and Theism 41 

world : and it is the business of philosophy, 
not simply to keep reiterating that some- 
how or other they are a unity, but to arrive 
at some definite conception which will 
make that unity thinkable. It is true 
there is a conception which might seem to 
be available here, the conception of an all- 
inclusive consciousness, but this is not any- 
thing we have a right to use so long as we 
remain on the level of the presuppositions 
with which we started. We are supposing 
that conscious facts, and material facts, are 
both equally real, and, moreover, that they 
are not at all alike ; and consequently the 
unity which includes them cannot be some- 
thing which resembles only one of them. 
A unity which is made up of both mate- 
rial bodies and conscious selves cannot 
be spoken of as matter simply, or simply 
as consciousness ; it is only a unity, to re- 
peat, which comes from heaping a mass 
of things together, and that is no organic 
unity at all. Accordingly pantheism, at 
least in this its first phase, is compelled 



42 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

to make its underlying unity in some 
degree transcend the finite world, if it 
is to serve as a unity in any real sense, 
and so to move in the direction which 
has already been described in speaking 
of the concepts of substance and of soul. 
Now along this path there is an easy 
approach to the conclusions of the pan- 
theist. It seemed to be necessary to ad- 
mit the existence of substance, in order 
to bring the different qualities into con- 
nection, and of a soul, to do the same 
office for the elements of the conscious 
life. But these two series have them- 
selves also to be joined. Now as soon 
as substance begins to be thought of as 
existing independently of its qualities, we 
are compelled to recognize that of its 
nature as thus existing by itself nothing 
whatever is known ; and the same thing 
is true of the soul as well. If, then, 
nothing is known of the reality underly- 
ing the phenomena of matter and of mind, 
we no longer have any reason for assert- 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 43 

ing that the reality is different in the 
two cases; they may just as easily be the 
expression of a single reality, or sub- 
stance, as of two. This is not to break 
down the distinction between mind and 
matter as attributes, or phenomena; as 
such they are altogether unlike. But so 
are the attributes which we are accus- 
tomed to assign to a unitary thing in the 
external world, — color, e.g., and sound. 
And if the underlying substance is really 
to serve as a principle of unity, it is not 
only possible thus to give up the inde- 
pendent substantial existence of matter 
and of soul, but we seem by all means 
to be driven to it, under penalty of adding 
arbitrarily to the number of distinct exist- 
ences which it is our problem to unite. 

There is another result of this concep- 
tion which calls for a passing notice. 
If mind and matter are only different 
expressions of an underlying unity, it no 
longer is necessary to think of them as 
exercising a mutual influence on each 



44 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

other. This is the solution which Spi- 
noza gives to the problem of interaction 
between body and soul. We find a cer- 
tain relation between the series of mate- 
rial changes in the body, and the series 
of conscious events, but this is not due 
to the fact that the mind moves the body, 
or that the body causes sensations to 
arise in consciousness : such a relation 
is only what we should expect if both 
series are but differing expressions of 
one and the same real existence. Each 
series is, then, shut up entirely within 
itself, so far as the other is concerned; 
the explanation of their relationship is. to 
be looked for in the ultimate unity of 
which they are parallel, but in nature 
essentially different, manifestations. 

In a general way such a conception 
as has just been stated already has come 
in for criticism. As soon as we start 
to make the ultimate reality a som.Qthing 
distinct from its attributes, we are sepa- 
rating it from the world of finite occur- 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 45 

rences, and rendering it useless as an 
explanation of them. If the essence of 
reality is this permanent, unchanging, 
indeterminate background, how does it 
bring about the world of change, of the 
interplay of transient qualities, which we 
know? If change and finiteness do not 
belong to the inner reality of the world, 
what sort of an existence have they ? 
logically we ought to deny them alto- 
gether, and that is a pretty difficult thing 
to do. On the other hand, if we do 
bring them within the sacred calm of 
the identical unitary Being, we have got 
to show how they are consistent with 
this, or else give up our unity. If, to 
repeat, we put the reality of existence 
back of finite things, we cut them off 
from reality, and thus make them quite 
inexplicable ; if we identify reality with 
them, we are left with a mere jumble of 
conflicting particulars, which no amount 
of calling a unity will really make so 
for the understanding. 



46 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

It must be remembered that this criti- 
cism is based upon the ordinary point of 
view, that both finite things and minds 
have at least some measure of reaUty in 
themselves. There are, however, two 
different standpoints which, in panthe- 
istic theories, are easily confused with 
this, and so serve to make the difficulties 
less apparent. Conceivably it might be 
maintained, as was suggested only a few 
lines back, that the finite is an out-and- 
out illusion, that it simply does not ex- 
ist. Such a mystic pantheism is not 
unknown in the history of philosophy, 
but it cannot be soberly defended, of 
course. The appearance of change and 
finiteness is at least not to be disputed, 
and this admission carries with it essen- 
tially the whole problem. Calling a thing 
an appearance does not thereby get rid 
of it altogether, and reduce it to bare 
nothingness; and so long as appearances 
are changing, we cannot declare that we 
have eliminated all change whatever from 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 47 

the universe, and still retain any mean- 
ing to language. But the word " appear- 
ance " suggests still another view of the 
matter, which is much more definite and 
comprehensible. We may say, that is, 
that the known qualities of things are 
only effects, m us, of the unknown reality 
back of them, ways in which this appears 
to Its, and that they are subjective there- 
fore, and do not belong at all to the real 
nature of that which appears. In the 
first case finite things were declared to 
be absolutely non-existent; now they are 
admitted to exist, but only as subjective 
appearances, effects of a separate and 
unknown real. In this manner we at 
least are able to give an intelligible 
meaning to the separation of the unitary 
substance from the finite world of phe- 
nomena, and can give each its due. But 
whether this can be carried out success- 
fully or not, at any rate it is not to be 
identified with monism, without further 
explanation at least. For evidently it 



48 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

involves not only something which ap- 
pears, but also something to which it 
appears, not one reality, but two; the 
conflict between the reality and finite 
existence is resolved only by allowing 
the latter a separate subjective existence, 
and so by giving up the doctrine that 
God is all. The two standpoints, how- 
ever, are continually playing more or less 
into each other's hands, and they will 
have to be spoken of again. 

The great advantage which pantheism 
represents, from the philosophic stand- 
point, is this, that it substitutes for the 
very difficult conception of an interaction 
between separate realities, which have to 
be brought together from the outside, an 
interaction of parts within a whole. ' If in 
this way we make the whole our starting- 
point, and recognize that no part of this 
has any rights except as it expresses the 
working of the whole, we can see more 
clearly how it might be that, in this mutual 
adjustment of elements, one change should 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 49 

be conditioned by another, whereas we 
could not comprehend such an interaction 
when we started with the elements as if 
they were complete each in itself. But 
when we come to ask just in what the 
nature of this unity consists, pantheism 
has thus far failed to give an answer. We 
may turn, then, to the theistic solution of 
the difficulty, in the form in which it is 
most commonly to be met with, and which, 
as the semi-official philosophy of religion, 
is familiar to most of us, perhaps as the 
most natural way of regarding the world. 
There is a slight ambiguity in speaking of 
this as theism, for it is in reality only one 
form of it ; accordingly that which follows 
must be understood to be directed, not 
against theism as such, but only against 
the special form in which it leaves us with 
three distinct factors of existence, — mate- 
rial things, conscious beings, and, as a third 
reality which creates and directs them, 
God. There has been a great deal of dis- 
cussion, which still continues up to the 



50 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

present day, as to just the value of the 
arguments which, starting from the con- 
ception of the world as it comes to us in 
ordinary experience, attempt to prove that 
the existence of a creative and overruling 
Providence is an indispensable require- 
ment for any satisfactory explanation of 
things. It will be sufficient to call atten- 
tion to two or three of the most essential 
considerations that are involved in this 
discussion, without attempting to treat it 
in very great detail. In one point, theism 
would seem to be, on the purely philosophi- 
cal side, at a disadvantage as compared 
with the pantheistic theory, in that, as 
finite things are no longer, in the ordinary 
sense, a part of God, we are led back, 
apparently, to the conception of an in- 
teraction between separate things. This 
difficulty theism seeks to obviate by sub- 
ordinating matter, so far as its origin goes 
at least, to conscious spirit, and by regard- 
ing it as brought into existence by divine 
power. And by this means, though in a 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 51 

less obvious way, theism might perhaps 
still retain, after all, that concept of the 
mutual relation of parts within a whole to 
which the necessity of explaining how in- 
teraction is possible appeared to lead ; for 
while finite things are not, according to 
it, a part of God's being directly, they are 
finally dependent upon it, and, through 
the medium of his creative power, they 
come within the unity of the purposes 
which make up his life. Of course the 
notion of creative power, directed accord- 
ing to conscious purpose, has been sub- 
stituted here for the immediate inclusion 
of elements within a whole which they 
directly and exclusively constitute ; still it 
is not clear that the unity which this in- 
volves is not sufficient to make the idea 
of interaction intelligible. But when we 
try to apply this to the material world, 
there are peculiar difficulties in the way. 
It is quite impossible to get any idea of 
the rationale of the process by which 
spirit can bring into existence a substance 



52 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

wholly distinct in characteristics from 
itself, and then can deal with it after it 
is created, though of course it might be 
answered that we cannot expect to under-, 
stand how everything is done. Perhaps 
not ; but the whole problem is not un- 
answerable merely, it is confusing : how, 
for instance, are we to understand the 
relation of God to space ? Real matter 
necessitates real space, and God is thus 
brought into relation to an endless spa- 
tial world which exists outside him, and so 
would seem to furnish him all the difficul- 
ties which infinite space presents to our 
thought. But what is perhaps the most 
fatal difficulty is our utter inability to see 
what this supposed matter can be like, 
thus set up in business for itself. Here 
we trench upon another field of philoso- 
phy, that which has been called epistemol- 
ogy ; and as this has still to be examined 
in more detail, the point may be reserved 
for the following chapter. But it may be 
said, summarily, that the difficulty lies in 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 53 

this. We cannot conceive of matter except 
in terms of conscious experience ; every 
quality we ascribe to it is, when looked 
at in another way, a conscious quality, a 
product of sensation or of thought. Con- 
sequently, when we are asked to conceive 
what the nature of this created matter is 
wholly by itself, apart from consciousness, 
we are set upon an impossible task.^ 

As this consideration introduces us to 
the province of epistemology, so the sec- 
ond difificulty to be mentioned involves 
the problem of cosmology. And here 
we have to face an extremely vital ques- 
tion, which concerns the entire existence 
of meaning, or purpose, in the world. 
Theism, of course, maintains that the 
world is governed by intelligence, and in 
general it adduces two main arguments 
to support its view. The first is the more 
abstract one, and is based on the idea of 
causation. It is said that, by a necessity 
of reason, every event that takes place in 
1 See p. 73. 



54 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

the world must be traced back to some 
preceding cause ; but this, while it may 
account well enough for each event in 
particular, will evidently not account for 
the world as a whole. For we never are 
able in this way to get to any first cause, 
but are driven back and back continually 
in an endless series. Since, however, 
such an infinite series is unthinkable, we 
must admit at some point an absolute first 
cause, which is itself uncaused. That this 
cause is intelligent, again, is sought to be 
proved by the second argument, which 
points out the actual evidences of design 
in the universe. Such instances of design 
— the eye made for seeing, the ear for 
hearing, and the like — are perfectly famil- 
iar to all, and certainly they have a good 
deal of popular evidence in their favor. 
As far as the first of these arguments 
is concerned, it is enough to suggest two 
or three objections which have been 
brought against it. It is a doubtful piece 
of logic to argue from the absolute neces- 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 55 

sity of a cause in every case, to the ex- 
istence of an absolute beginning, which 
does not need a cause ; nor can we quite 
safely get the infinite conclusion with 
which we bring up, out of premises 
which are strictly finite. Furthermore, it 
is always open, in a case where we are 
arguing on the basis of an abstract truth 
like the law of causation, to ask what 
proof we have of the absolute necessity 
of our law, upon which everything de- 
pends ; and to answer this we have either 
to enter on a particularly abstruse meta- 
physical inquiry, or else fall back on the 
appeal to self-evidence, which, as the his- 
tory of philosophy has shown again and 
again, is very likely to be an appeal to 
custom and tradition. But the point 
which is especially to be emphasized is 
this, — and it applies to both arguments 
alike, — that in so far as, on this show- 
ing, intelligence enters in, it is in the 
form of a distinct and supplementary 
power. There are a certain number of 



56 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

facts that can be explained by mechan- 
ism, by natural laws; teleology appears 
only where mechanism breaks down. It 
is just as in the case of human workman- 
ship : the tree is a natural process, ex- 
plainable by its own laws, but when the 
carpenter begins to work upon the tree, 
a new factor is introduced which, from 
the standpoint of the laws which govern 
the tree's growth, is not natural at all. A 
very similar statement can be made about 
the argument from cause : the string of 
events is quite explainable on natural 
grounds until we reach the end, and then 
a wholly new power is appealed to, which 
cannot be stated in scientific terms. 

Now in so far as the dispute between 
the mechanical and the teleological ex- 
planation of the world is based upon this 
idea, that some things can be explained 
in terms of mechanism, i.e., in the large 
sense, of natural law, while others de- 
mand a higher explanation, a direct ap- 
peal to purpose or design, it is simply a 



Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 57 

fact of history that the principle of tele- 
ology has tended to be more and more 
displaced by the other. Science has 
steadily proceeded on the theory that 
for everything a natural explanation is 
to be looked for, in terms of physical 
law; and its justification has been in its 
success. One sphere after another has 
been brought under the sway of scientific 
method, and since the last great step in 
advance, the establishment of the princi- 
ple of evolution, there are few scientists 
who do not have a well-earned confidence 
that, in the end, no phenomenon in the 
universe will remain outside the sphere 
of universal law. Of course this cannot 
be demonstrated in any strict logical 
sense, and the scientist who tried to do 
that would misunderstand his business. 
It is, however, a well-grounded convic- 
tion, based on the whole history of sci- 
ence ; and the attempt to dispute it is 
coming more and more to be felt as a 
difficult, if not a desperate, undertaking. 



58 Dualism, Pantheism, and Theism 

In so far as teleology means a breaking 
into what would otherwise have been 
the natural order of events, by a separate 
and transcendent power, whose workings 
cannot be reduced to strictly scientific 
formulae, it has the whole weight of sci- 
entific achievement against it. And if, 
as we said at starting, philosophy is an 
attempt, not to reason out a scheme of 
the universe on the basis of certain ab- 
stract truths, but to account for the facts 
of life in their entirety, then no philoso- 
phy can fail to recognize the great body 
of facts which science represents, and 
still perform its function. We must 
either drop the notion of end altogether, 
or else we must adopt some new concep- 
tion of what end, or design, means, and 
of how it works. 



MATERIALISM AND SUB- 
JECTIVE IDEALISM 




MATERIALISM AND SUB- 
JECTIVE IDEALISM 

|N the preceding chapter we had 
to consider how the attempt to 
get at a conception which shall 
explain things as a unity, gives rise to 
the categories of substance and of soul, 
which, however, prove, when they are 
examined, to be much too abstract and 
rigid to perform their office with any 
degree of success. The necessity, again, 
of bringing the two sets of facts which 
these concepts represent themselves into 
connection, revealed other difficulties, and 
forced us to the recognition that interac- 
tion, not only between unlike things, but 
between any two things at all, requires 
the conception of a larger unity in which 
the interacting things exist, not indepen- 

6i 



62 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

dently, but as in some way elements. 
Pantheism took up this conception of 
finite things as elements within a whole, 
but the unity which it supplied turned 
out to be abstract and verbal merely. 
Theism furnished a somewhat more defi- 
nite conception, but when we came to 
consider the notion of created matter 
with greater care, it presented serious 
difficulties, while in so far as theism pos- 
tulates the presence of intelligence or 
design in the universe, it seemed to con- 
flict with the results of scientific method. 
Accordingly, it seemed necessary either 
to drop the conception of design alto- 
gether, or else conceive of its relation to 
mechanism in some more organic way. 

The first of these alternatives is adopted 
by a philosophy which, by reason of its 
great apparent simplicity, and of the 
support which it appears to receive from 
the most tangible and seemingly self- 
evident facts of human experience, those 
with which science deals, has always ex- 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 6} 

erted an extraordinary attraction on a 
certain type of mind. This is the philo- 
sophical attitude of Materialism. The 
materialist would, indeed, usually object 
to having himself called a philosopher. 
He rather prides himself on sticking to 
obvious and self-evident facts, as opposed 
to the oversubtilty of theorists who are 
trying somehow to get behind the facts, 
and to exalt above them figments of their 
own creation. But it is evident that, in 
spite of this, the materialist is a philos- 
opher without his knowing it. He is 
taking one attitude towards the world 
out of a number which are possible — the 
most obvious and natural attitude, it may 
perhaps be, but at least not the only 
conceivable one. And the fact, if it be 
a fact, that it is the first standpoint that 
one tends to adopt when he begins to 
think about reality, certainly is not enough 
to exempt the position from examination 
and criticism : that is a stand which the 
scientist of all men could least afford to 



64 Materialism and Stibjective Idealism 

take, for he cannot advance a step with- 
out overturning obvious and received 
opinions. Materialism is, therefore, by 
no means a self-evident theory, but re- 
quires definite proof. 

Now the materialist attempts to give 
this proof, not by examining his presup- 
positions, but by appealing to the ad- 
mitted facts of science : the latter 
constitutes the strength, the former the 
weakness of his position. For there can 
be no doubt that, in so far as material- 
ism is a mere statement of scientific 
method, a recognition of the necessity of 
bringing everything under natural law, 
it has been of the greatest value in the 
history of thought. The scientist in his 
practical procedure, in so far as he is 
merely a scientist, is necessarily a mate- 
rialist; he has no court of appeal except 
to facts which reach him through the 
senses; he has no laws or forces which 
he is justified in calling to his aid except 
those which are expressed in natural 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 65 

phenomena. But the scientist as such 
is not pretending to give a final account 
of the world, but only of the way in 
which a certain particular group of phe- 
nomena acts. The materialist, as the up- 
holder of a philosophical theory, now takes 
these laws which the scientist discovers, 
and expressly puts them forward, not 
simply as true, but as the whole of truth, 
its final statement. He shows how one 
by one those facts which men had thought 
to be anomalous, and to require the 
working of a higher power to account 
for them, have been explained without 
recourse to any such hypothesis, until 
now, if we grant the existence of parti- 
cles of matter which are moving in rela- 
tion to one another with velocities that 
can be reduced to an exact quantitative 
expression, we have all the data neces- 
sary to account for the most complicated 
events. Of course literally this is not. 
yet true, but every year makes it more 
nearly true, and the scientist has faith 



66 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

to believe that conceivably he might get 
a formula which, if he could know the 
exact state of the world at any one mo- 
ment, would enable him to forecast the 
entire future course of events with mathe- 
matical certainty, since by the subjection 
of every particle of matter to the unde- 
viating laws of mechanical interaction, 
the future depends upon the past with 
the inevitableness of fate. The great 
stumbling-block which was formerly sup- 
posed to lie in the way of such an ex- 
planation, in the marvellous adaptations 
that meet us in organic life, has been re- 
moved by the theory of evolution. If, 
so the materialist thinks, we admit the 
action of the environment in selecting 
out from a multitude of minute and inde- 
terminate variations, those which are use- 
ful to the organism, through the process 
of exterminating such individuals as fail 
to possess these, and so are handicapped 
in the struggle for existence, and if in 
addition we grant the influence of hered- 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 67 

ity in transmitting these favorable varia- 
tions by a cumulative process, we are in 
a position to explain all the adaptations 
of organic structure, without the neces- 
sity of appealing to intelligence. Since 
therefore, as he supposes, the existence 
of matter in motion is an undoubted fact, 
the hypothesis of a God, or of intelli- 
gence, is no longer needed by him, and 
must simply be allowed to drop away. It 
is the product of a prescientific age, 
formulated to explain facts that could 
not otherwise be accounted for; now that 
we can explain the facts without going 
outside material forces whose existence 
every one admits, the hypothesis ceases 
even to be plausible. 

But what are we to say of those facts 
which apparently are so unlike material 
processes, the facts of consciousness .'' 
These also, says the materialist, can be 
accounted for as the results of material 
conditions ; and he proceeds to bring for- 
ward the numerous indications of the 



68 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

close and immediate connection between 
the conscious life and the material body. 
The facts are known to every one, and 
are sufficiently striking. Consciousness 
only makes its appearance when the body 
and the brain have reached a certain 
stage of development ; it varies with the 
physical condition of the body, with health 
and sickness, sleep and waking, and with 
all sorts of peculiarities of structure ; and, 
finally, when the organic structure of the 
body goes to pieces, consciousness straight- 
way disappears. Any book on psychology 
or physiology will furnish a multitude of 
examples, and every day the tendency is 
growing stronger in the direction of find- 
ing a physical process for every conscious 
one, and of making this series of nervous 
changes on the physical side a continu- 
ous chain, complete within itself, which 
finds its sufficient explanation without 
going outside the physical realm. Con- 
sciousness, then, says the materialist, must 
be looked on as merely a product, or a 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 69 

function, of matter, a secretion of the 
brain as bile is a secretion of the iiver; 
it is a mere transitory phase of existence, 
entirely unreal as compared with the per- 
manent ground from which it springs. 

And yet these arguments, apparently 
so strong, fall away on the most cas- 
ual examination of their presuppositions. 
What is it, then, that the materialist means 
by consciousness .? Often he appears to 
mean that consciousness itself is matter. 
But if he means this, he simply does not 
understand what he is saying. For if he 
understands by matter what other people 
do, something which has the qualities of 
shape, and impenetrability, and movement 
in space, then a sensation or a feeling 
does not possess these qualities, and no 
amount of verbal identification can make 
them do so. What he really has to mean 
when he is pressed down to it is, that 
consciousness is a product of matter, but 
a product which is different in nature 
from the source from which it springs. 



70 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

But then the analogies which he uses to 
express the relation no longer will apply. 
A product of material processes, in the 
sense in which bile is a product of the 
liver, is itself matter; a function of such 
processes, the function, say, of the heart, 
involves nothing but the heart itself at 
work, and performing a certain part in 
the economy of the organic system. Con- 
sciousness is evidently not represented 
truly by either of these terms, and the 
materialist's explanation, consequently, will 
not apply. He has staked everything on 
his ability to reduce the whole of exist- 
ence to terms of matter and motion, and 
here is an element of existence which 
remains outside his scheme. All that is 
left for him to do is to say that the po- 
tencies of matter are wholly beyond our 
power to set a limit to, and that therefore 
among them there may be the possibility 
of producing a form of reality apparently 
so unlike itself as consciousness is. But 
this is to leave the field of science, and 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 71 

to do just what the materialist blames the 
theist for doing, forsake a reasoned ex- 
planation, and fall back on an appeal to 
a mysterious and unknown power. The 
fact remains that consciousness is some- 
thing which falls beyond the range of 
those events which are satisfactorily ac- 
counted for as movements of matter, and 
that it apparently does not enter in 
at all to that system of mathematically 
equivalent transformations of energy 
which forms the basis of a physical ex- 
planation. Since, therefore, on the one 
hand, it refuses to be reduced to matter 
in motion, and cannot, on the other hand, 
be pushed aside as a sheer illusion, some 
other category than that of matter will 
have to be adopted as our ultimate one, 
which is broad enough to take conscious- 
ness in. 

It might be well, also, to point out 
here a disability under which materialism 
lies in dealing with the problem of inter- 
action. It was seen in the last chapter 



72 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

that, if we start with a lot of separate 
things, the problem of their action on 
one another becomes very difficult to 
solve; and that it is only by starting at 
the other end, and taking the whole, not 
the separate parts, as our primary data, 
that we begin to get a basis for under- 
standing it. But materialism does not 
at all lend itself to this conception which 
we seem to require if interaction is to be 
explained ; on the contrary, the separation 
of particles in space which it presupposes 
is the very essence of exclusiveness, and 
there does not appear to be any way of 
thinking of them as a whole, except in so 
far as they form a mere aggregate, which 
is not an organic unity, nor indeed a unity 
at all, except as it is one for some perceiv- 
ing mind. It is true we try to get them 
into some sort of connection by using the 
idea of force as a uniting bond, but it is 
impossible to explain what we are to 
understand by this. If force is regarded 
as an immaterial bond, no one can tell 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 7} 

•what we mean by such a bond, which 
gathers up solid particles of matter and 
forms them into a unity, to say nothing of 
the inconsistency of a materialist's appeal- 
ing to the immaterial ; and if force is itself 
another material something, it will serve 
no purpose in uniting matter, for it has 
itself to be brought into unity with matter. 
But there is another objection to the posi- 
tion of the materialist which by itself, as 
soon as one comes to understand it, is 
entirely conclusive; and it is largely due 
to this that, in spite of the great popular 
vogue of materialistic theories, it is diffi- 
cult, if not impossible, to point out a single 
thinker of any real importance in modern 
times who has been ready to adopt it in 
its simplicity. There are two ways in 
which the objection may be put. If we 
ask what it is we know about matter, we 
discover that all our knowledge comes to 
us through the senses. There is literally 
no quality which we attribute to it, color, 
form, hardness, elasticity, which is not 



74 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

based directly upon a sense quality, and 
which cannot, when looked at from an- 
other standpoint, be put in terms of this. 
If, that is to say, matter is regarded as 
something distinct from consciousness, we 
yet have to admit that it is only through 
the medium of consciousness that we know 
anything about matter, and that it is only 
in terms of conscious sensation that we 
can describe it. Consciousness is, for us, 
the ultimate. Instead of its being so, 
then, as the materialist assumes, that 
matter is that which is given originally 
and primarily, and about which there can 
be no reasonable doubt, it may be argued 
that just the opposite is true. And we 
therefore have the double difficulty: that 
what we were wishing to take as a mere 
transitory product of matter is the abso- 
lute presupposition of the existence of 
matter, so far as our experience is con- 
cerned; and that every quality which we 
ascribe to matter is, it would seem, after 
all only the same thing that we otherwise 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 75 

know as a sensation, so that when we set 
aside this content, nothing whatever is left. 

There is another way in which the same 
essential difficulty may be put. The real 
world of the modern materialist, at least, 
is not the actual world which we see 
when we look about us, but a highly 
abstract world of moving atoms, follow- 
ing fixed laws, a world that never can 
appear to our actual bodily senses, though 
it is based upon them. In other words, 
it is a thought world, something which, 
from its hypothetical atoms and ether to 
the laws which they follow (what can 
the material existence of a law mean.?), 
is through and through the product of 
thought But thought is the work of 
intelligence, of spirit, and can no more 
be caught and fossilized into an unspirit- 
ual existence than, outside of Wonder- 
land, the grin can remain behind after 
the cat has disappeared. 

We thus have reached the surprising 
result, that while we started with the 



16 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

supposition that nothing exists but mat- 
ter, we have suddenly found ourselves 
brought up at the totally opposite con- 
clusion, that nothing exists but mind; 
from Materialism we have passed to 
Idealism. The considerations which have 
just been mentioned suggest, indeed, two 
somewhat different forms of idealistic 
theory, but for the present we may 
confine ourselves to that more obvious 
form which goes by the name of sub- 
jective idealism, and the arguments for 
which we have already indicated. All 
that we can experience immediately, it 
is said, is our own states of conscious- 
ness; matter, as something which exists 
beyond consciousness, is simply an in- 
ference which is built upon the data 
of these sensations. It seems, indeed, 
almost self-evident that we can ex- 
perience directly nothing which is not 
our experience; and if matter has also 
an existence of its own, there must be 
some bridge required to get us to it 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 77 

which is not needed in the case of our 
own conscious life. If, therefore, matter 
can be entirely reduced to terms of our 
sensations, which are the indubitable facts 
whose existence alone is given directly, 
and if the concept of matter, as some- 
thing opposed to consciousness, is now 
deprived of all content except a conscious 
content, and so we are left with no way 
of conceiving what it can be by itself, 
why should we not throw matter over- 
board entirely, and content ourselves with 
the only facts which can be verified ? 
It is, indeed, generally agreed that what 
are called the secondary qualities of mat- 
ter — color, sound, smell, and the like — 
are thus subjective affections of our own ; 
but it is impossible to stop here, for the 
same arguments apply with precisely the 
same force to the so-called primary 
qualities as well, which are popularly 
supposed to belong to matter in itself, 
— extension, i.e., and impenetrability. 
These also certainly are made known 



78 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

to us through sense perception; why, 
then, should we suppose that they have 
any existence except as they are sensibly 
perceived, any more than the color or fra- 
grance of the rose exists when no one 
is there to experience it ? — an idea which 
science has long ago exploded. Indeed, 
what possible conception can we form of 
a sense quality which has an existence 
when it is not perceived ? If we hold 
to the fact that all our supposed know- 
ledge of the qualities of matter comes to 
us through sensation, can we still retain 
the belief that these sense qualities give 
us information about a material some- 
thing beyond themselves, unless we admit 
the apparent contradiction that a sensa- 
tion may resemble that of which it is an 
essential determination that it is not a 
sensation ? We have already seen that 
the substance which underlies what we 
call qualities of an objective thing is 
confessedly beyond our knowledge, and 
therefore utterly useless. If, then, it is 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 79 

inconceivable in itself, and of no account 
in explaining other things, why not get 
rid of it altogether ? Matter, accordingly, 
would not exist, but only selves, with a 
succession of conscious states, or sensa- 
tions. 

Most probably our first tendency on 
hearing an argument of this sort is to 
follow the illustrious example of Dr. 
Johnson, and proceed to kick a post, or 
do something equally violent, in order 
to prove irrefutably that solid matter can- 
not be so easily gotten rid of. But the 
argument, it is to be noticed, does not 
by any means imply that because what 
we call matter is only our own sensa- 
tions, we can therefore have at any time 
any sensation we please; and consequently 
the fact that the particular kind of sen- 
sation which we can have depends on 
conditions to a large extent independent 
of our own arbitrary will, is no argu- 
ment against the theory. In Berkeley, 
who represents the classic expression of 



80 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

this type of idealism, there is a perfectly 
clear recognition of this element of ex- 
perience, and it is even made an essen- 
tial part of his theory. Evidently the 
string of sensations of which each of us 
is conscious, is not sufficient to account 
satisfactorily for itself; but instead of 
falling back on a conception like that of 
matter, which is unthinkable and contra- 
dictory, Berkeley appeals to the idea of 
God. It is essential, that is, to have 
some ulterior reality in order to account 
for the sensations in oneself; and by 
thinking of this reality as a conscious 
being, we avoid the necessity of postulat- 
ing any other kind of existence than the 
one whose possibility we have already 
guaranteed in our own self-knowledge. 
It is God's power, then, which causes 
our sensations to be arranged in the 
particular order which they follow. That 
the sensation of stretching forth the arm 
is followed by a sensation of pressure, is 
not due to the existence of an actual 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 81 

object out in space, but to the fact that 
God has made it necessary for these two 
sensations to go together. The content, 
then, of the external world is due to our 
sensations; but the order and necessary 
connection which it shows depend upon 
the immediate will of God. 

Perhaps no theory in the history of 
speculation which is on the face of it so 
paradoxical, and so subversive of ordinary 
common-sense opinions, has had so great 
an influence as Bishop Berkeley's sub- 
jective idealism. Even men who have 
been far from accepting its conclusions 
have pronounced its reasoning unanswer- 
able, and in general its opponents have 
made but little attempt to point out 
wherein the fallacy consists, and have 
contented themselves with calling atten- 
tion to the absurdities, practical and other- 
wise, to which, if adopted, it will lead. 
In the present chapter we shall consider 
merely this negative side, leaving to an- 
other connection the attempt to show more 



82 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

positively the point at which the argument 
for subjective idealism goes astray. It 
may be said, in the first place, that 
whether the theory is true or not, it is 
at any rate so far principally destructive, 
and fails to give any clear explanation of 
the positive fact of experience with which 
it started. That fact was the apparent 
difference between material things and 
mental states. Granting that the differ- 
ence is only apparent, yet a complete 
theory must at least account for the per- 
sistency of the illusion. The fact, how- 
ever, that has been of most weight in 
recent times in making men unwilling to 
accept Berkeleyanism, in spite of its theo- 
retical clearness and attractiveness, is 
probably this, that it seems to be destruc- 
tive of all that vast framework of scientific 
achievement which is the most character- 
istic product of our century. If sensations 
are produced directly by the power of 
God, then it is difficult to see what func- 
tion is left for all the intricate machinery 



Materialism and Subjective Idealism 83 

of forces and molecular structures by 
which science explains the phenomenal 
world. And yet the work of science can- 
not be simply thrust aside ; and when it 
comes to choosing between the solid and 
lasting results which it has won, and what 
on the other hand is apt to seem a specu- 
lative subtilty, sober common sense is 
likely to prefer the former. Since, how- 
ever, in a speculative way, the arguments 
for idealism cannot be overthrown, the 
result has frequently been a curious waver- 
ing between two extremes, each of which 
is held according to the needs of the 
moment, but each of which is in reality 
destructive of the other. A scientific ex- 
planation of sensation is sought in the 
function of the nervous system, which in 
this instance is taken as a reality that 
must exist before sensation can come into 
being. But then, again, when we ask how 
this nervous system is known, it is ad- 
mitted that it is nothing but a lot of sen- 
sations or possible sensations. Evidently, 



84 Materialism and Subjective Idealism 

then, unless we are to move in an eternal 
circle, we must consider more carefully the 
process by which these contradictory con- 
clusions have been reached. 



RATIONALISM AND SENSA- 
TIONALISM 




RATIONALISM AND SENSA- 
TIONALISM 

HEN the difficulties which 
centre about the attempt to 
combine two quite different 
kinds of reaHty in a unitary world be- 
come evident, the most obvious way out 
of them is by trying to take one of the 
two things which have to be united as 
alone representing reality, and then to 
reduce the other to it. This attempt we 
have had to consider in the last chapter, 
and so far it has not proved successful. 
Materialism represents a real advance in 
scientific method, but fails to meet the 
requirements of an ultimate theory. If 
we take matter as the only real thing, 
then consciousness refuses to be reduced 
87 



88 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

to it, to say nothing of the fact that the 
concept of matter is not a concept of 
unity, but of plurality. When we try, 
on the other hand, to reduce matter to 
mind, the process is much more simple; 
but we have to face the result that appar- 
ently we have thrown overboard in the 
operation a great number of things which 
we can hardly afford to lose. If we ex- 
amine the point to which we have thus 
been led, it will be evident that the stress 
of the problem has shifted from the field 
of ontology or cosmology, to that of episte- 
mology. Before we can proceed further 
in determining what the nature of reality 
is, it seems that we shall have to take 
account more minutely and carefully than 
we have done so far of the process of 
knowledge itself, for in the case of every- 
thing that is known, the act of knowing 
is of course always implied. In Berkeley's 
case, it is true, the ontological interest is 
still uppermost. Berkeley is interested 
primarily to prove that a certain supposed 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 89 

kind of reality, matter, does not, in point 
of fact, exist in the way we are inclined 
to think it does ; and it is only as a way 
of approach to this that he enters into 
an examination of the conditions involved 
in a knowledge of matter. Epistemology 
is still an incident, then, not an end in 
itself. But with Berkeley's great succes- 
sor, Hume, the purely epistemological in- 
quiry begins to stand more by itself, and 
centred about it there commences a brill- 
iant philosophical development, which has 
proved of decisive importance for modern 
thinking. 

If we examine the problem of episte- 
mology more closely, we shall find that 
there are two pretty distinct questions 
involved, which are not always clearly 
distinguished, but which, in reality, need 
to be treated separately. First there is 
the question as to what is the source or 
medium of knowledge ; whether, as one 
school holds, it is given through sensa- 
tion, or whether there is, besides sensa- 



90 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

tion, a rational faculty of thought which 
is a revealer of truth. So far the ques- 
tion is one simply of the process of 
knowing, which is a process within ex- 
perience, within otcr experience, as we 
should be apt to say. But also we are 
disposed to think that knowledge is al- 
ways a knowledge of something, and that 
this something which is known is a quite 
distinct existence from the process of 
knowing it. The latter is what we call an 
experience of ours, while the former is 
not such an experience; it exists some- 
how for itself, and our experience, whether 
it is thought of as sensational or as ra- 
tional, only copies or represents it. In 
addition, therefore, to the former ques- 
tion, What is the nature, psychologically, 
of the knowing process as an immediate 
part of our experience .'* we also need to 
ask. How can this immediate experience, 
sensation or what not, give us information 
of something that exists independently 
of it.? how is it possible to bridge over 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 91 

the gap between the fact of experience 
which we get directly, and that which it 
represents, if the latter is, in its own 
proper existence, forever beyond our 
circle of experience, and so can only be, 
it would seem, an object of inference ? 
This last problem is involved in Berke- 
ley's constant assumption of other selves 
and of God, whose existence we can of 
course not immediately experience, but a 
knowledge of whom is implicitly assumed 
as possible. On the other hand, when 
it comes to the external world, Berkeley 
denies this transubjective reference ; he 
refuses to accept the common belief that 
sensations, or at least some of them, are 
copies of a reality beyond, and holds 
that all we can know is the sensation 
itself, which has no power of standing 
for anything else. The second problem 
of epistemology is thus answered, so far 
as the external world is concerned, by 
denying the fact which had to be ex- 
plained, while as regards other selves and 



92 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

God, the fact is assumed without any 
very adequate explanation. 

Now it is the first of these two prob- 
lems which has, in the history of phi- 
losophy, been most systematically and 
consciously argued about, and the second 
has for the most part been somewhat 
confusedly mixed up with it. We may 
then consider, in the present chapter, 
the source of knowledge and nature of 
the knowing process, as it has been for- 
mulated in the two opposing schools of 
sensationalists and rationalists. And in 
order to make the difference between 
them clearer, it may be well to say a 
few words about the historical origin of 
the antithesis. From the very begin- 
ning of philosophical thinking, there has 
been a recognition of the fact that the 
results of reflective thought cannot be 
made to correspond completely with the 
immediate impressions of ordinary sense 
experience, but the nature and ground of 
the difference was still left vague and 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 93 

undetermined. The first step towards a 
scientific analysis was taken by Socrates. 
Socrates was interested, for practical rea- 
sons, in finding some permanent and 
universal standard which could be ap- 
plied to human action. Since, then, on 
the surface men's ideas and opinions are 
varied and contradictory, he was led to 
look back of these manifold differences 
and inconsistencies, and to find the truth 
in that residuum in which, after their 
differences have been eliminated, men 
ultimately agree. If, for instance, we 
want to know what a chair or a table 
really is, we must disregard all unessen- 
tial peculiarities of color or shape, and 
get back to that in which all men's ideas 
correspond, and without which it would 
cease to be a chair or table. In other 
words, Socrates started out to hunt for 
what we call the concept, the abstract 
or general idea, as that about which sci- 
entific thought, as opposed to sense per- 
ception, was to busy itself. Now Plato, 



94 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

who was much more interested in mere 
abstract thinking for its own sake than 
was Socrates, developed this conception 
in a way which was of the utmost impor- 
tance. Here, on the one side, was the ob- 
ject of sense, the particular table which we 
see, and on the other hand the concept 
table, which did not exist in the realm of 
sense experience, but only in the realm 
of thought. Since, however, Plato had 
no doubt that thought, and indeed thought 
alone, enables us to get hold of the only 
kind of reality which is really worth 
knowing, what sort of reality is it to 
which the concept corresponds } Plato 
answered this in the most natural way 
at the time, by assuming, alongside the 
world of sense, another world, the world 
of ideas or concepts ; and just as sense 
experience tells us of the real existence 
of the particular table, so thought tells 
us of the existence of the concept table, 
only in a supersensible, not a sensible, 
world. Indeed, the process of knowing 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 95 

these concepts was also conceived quite 
after the analogy of sensible perception ; 
only, as in our present life thinking seems 
to be a direct and spontaneous act, the 
occasion of beholding these divine arche- 
types in the world of ideas was assigned to 
a previous existence, and thought was re- 
garded as a recollection of the impressions 
which at that time had been imprinted 
on the soul. We have, therefore, a dis- 
tinct dualism, a world of real (sensible) 
things, and a higher realm of ideas, which 
are the ultimate form of reality, and in- 
which sensible things somehow partici- 
pate, after a fashion which Plato never 
succeeded in making clear ; and, corre- 
sponding to this, we have two separate 
faculties in man, sense and thought, 
busied respectively about these two dif- 
ferent classes of objects. 

The assumption that the idea or concept 
has an actual existence by itself was sure, 
sooner or later, to come into question, and 
during the Middle Ages it was the centre 



96 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

of a fierce conflict between the so-called 
Realists, and their opponents the Nomi- 
nalists. These latter maintained, in gen- 
eral, that concepts are only products of 
human thought, and that real existences 
are always concrete and individual. 
For a long time the conflict was essen- 
tially one between theological conserva- 
tism and progress, and the issue was to 
decide whether thought should be re- 
stricted to a world outside the finite world, 
one that was abstract, and fixed by dogma 
and tradition (for a purely logical process 
requires its starting-point to be taken as 
established and self-evident, and a self- 
evident truth is very apt to be merely a 
tradition, something we have grown so 
used to that it does not occur to us to 
examine it) ; or whether men should be 
allowed to find reality in actual life, to 
interrogate it, and learn from it immedi- 
ately and for themselves : and in so far 
as it stood for this, the victory lay finally 
with nominalism. Accordingly, there was 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 97 

witnessed a displacement of intellectual- 
ism by empiricism. Instead of deducing 
truth demonstratively from self-evident 
premises, by the mere process of logic, 
a process whose barrenness had become 
more and more apparent, men were told 
to open their eyes and look about them. 
That was truth which actually approved 
itself to the senses, and the only way to 
get hold of truth was empirically, by let- 
ting it come in immediate contact with the 
eye, and hand, and ear. The *' ideas " 
with which men had been busy before 
were not derived, as they had thought, 
from a special source: they were only an 
abstraction of the common elements of 
those individual things which we get at 
originally in sense experience. 

Since the close of the Middle Ages, 
however, there can hardly be said to have 
been, at least in the intention of its up- 
holders, any actual hostility to scientific 
inquiry as such on the part of rational- 
istic philosophy. There has been a gen- 



98 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

eral disposition to agree, on both sides, 
that, within a certain sphere, the scientific 
observation and colligation of particular 
facts is a necessary and justifiable pro- 
ceeding, and makes possible a knowledge 
of the world which we cannot get from 
any process of logic. No one, again, 
would seriously hold at the present day 
that there is an actual supersensible world 
made up of concepts, or abstract ideas ; 
there is a pretty wide agreement that the 
commoner concepts are arrived at as 
nominalism maintained, by abstracting 
those elements which are common to all 
members of a class ; and that therefore 
they exist as a mental product, not in 
nature. On the other hand, nominalism 
soon found that a world of mere isolated 
particulars, waiting to be picked up one 
by one through observation, was not a 
sufficient basis for fruitfulness in the sci- 
entific inquiry which it had so much at 
heart. For a practical working method, 
science did not find it enough merely to 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 99 

chronicle sense impressions : it required 
some intellectual tool which would ena- 
ble it also to deduce, necessarily and 
exactly, events which were not actually 
present to the senses. This tool it found 
in mathematics. Mathematics, then, sup- 
plies again the rational and logical ele- 
ment which sensationalism was inclined 
to minimize, and the old problem, though 
in a changed form, of course, thus passes 
over into modern thought. We no longer 
think that the abstract table exists in 
rerum natura, but we talk about the law 
of gravitation as really existing and acting, 
in much the same way that the old real- 
ists talked of the ideas of good and of 
justice. Our scientific world is almost 
wholly expressed in terms of law, and 
the relation of law to the facts of sense 
is, therefore, still a real problem. 

In view of all this it is not an easy 
thing to formulate any single statement 
which shall adequately express the rela- 
tion of rationalism to sensationalism in 



100 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

modern thought, but in a rough way it 
may perhaps be summed up as follows. 
The existence of a rational element, i.e., 
of certain principles of order and connec- 
tion, through which alone we can get 
any grip upon particular facts of sense 
experience, and arrange them into an 
objective world, amenable to scientific 
treatment, is admitted by all; the ques- 
tion turns upon the source through which 
these principles are obtained. To use a 
well-known phrase, it is a question of the 
existence of innate ideas. Sensationalism 
holds that we have various particular sense 
experiences, and that these form our en- 
tire data ; by noticing the nature and 
arrangement of these we may formulate 
certain principles, which we may infer 
to be applicable to other experiences as 
well ; but this is an inference, and nothing 
more, and all that we can say of a cer- 
tainty is that they are true of the actually 
experienced facts from which they were 
drawn. Rationalism maintains, on the 



Rationalism and Sensationalism lOi 

contrary, that sense experience sets the 
mind to working on its own account, and 
causes it to deliver itself of truths which 
are not contained in any of our actual 
experiences, or in all of them together, 
but which extend over a wider ground 
than experience can possibly cover. 
These truths, to be sure, no longer are 
regarded as constituting an abstract world 
of reality by themselves in Plato's sense, 
but they are supposed to tell us something 
abotit reality, with a certainty which the 
senses never can give. We feel sure 
that they are true, not because we can 
trace and verify them in experience, but 
because, along with the recognition of 
them, goes a certain inner light, a feel- 
ing of certitude and self-evidence which 
compels belief. These truths, moreover, 
are not concerned with mere empirical 
and finite facts, such as get to us through 
perception, but with the fundamental real- 
ities of the universe ; and by properly 
combining them and arguing from them, 



102 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

we may hope to attain to ultimate and 
metaphysical reality. The ideal, of course, 
would be to get a single truth from which 
everything could be deduced ; but failing 
this, we may be satisfied to sift out the 
various isolated truths of which reason 
delivers herself, and to arrange these in 
such connection as they will allow. 

The real nature of this ideal of logical 
demonstration, upon which rationalism 
is based, can be more conveniently spoken 
of in a subsequent chapter; for the 
present one or two less fundamental 
points may be noticed briefly. Just the 
history of the process through which the 
belief in a special intellectual faculty has 
arisen might itself make us hesitate 
about accepting it, but on this it is not 
necessary to insist. The essential fact 
for which rationalism stands, as against 
sensationalism, is the existence of some- 
thing more in the world of experience 
than a mere succession of sense data, 
— the existence, that is, of principles, of 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 103 

laws, to which the sensuous experience 
conforms, and which are more vitally 
related to it than would be the case were 
we to take them as simply secondary 
derivations, or abstractions, from an origi- 
nal reality which is adequately repre- 
sented as a lot of isolated sensations. But 
now even if the justice of this be admit- 
ted, — and it will be seen presently that 
sensationalism finds a difficulty here, — 
yet the way in which the rationaUst 
goes to work prevents him from offering 
a solution which is convincing. For in 
so far as he isolates the intellectual 
principles from the sensuous data, and 
gives them, as abstract thought, a sepa- 
rate origin, he is making it hard work 
to conceive of them as the laws of 
these data. The result is that the ration- 
alist is always puzzled to fit sensations 
into his scheme, and if he does not 
try to get rid of them altogether, by 
making them either an illusion, or else 
a form of abstract thought in dis- 



104 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

guise, which has -somehow become con- 
fused and blurred, — and neither of these 
devices can be made to convey a clear 
and definite idea, — he has to end up 
with a dualism between sense and thought 
which leaves the connection very much 
in the dark. The sensuous material he 
is obliged in some sense to admit; but 
if he assigns the intellectual principles 
to another source, and makes them deal 
with what is, in some degree, a different 
field of interests, then sense experience 
is just what the sensationalist claims it 
is, mere isolated sensations, and the prin- 
ciples, imported from without, apply to 
it only in an external way. But now 
every one has to admit that when it 
comes to the actual facts of the world 
as they are known to science, we are 
dependent on observation and experience, 
and that self-evident truths of the intel- 
lect, no matter how valuable they may 
be in other spheres, go here a very 
short way indeed. The consequence is 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 105 

that the rationalist practically grants that, 
for the great mass of experience, the 
sensationalist's explanation is correct, and 
he is able to reserve for himself only 
a little group of very abstract principles. 
It has already been remarked that, so 
far as the commoner concepts go, no 
stress is any longer laid upon them, and 
it is generally allowed that they may be 
derived from experience by abstraction. 
So also no one would think of establishing 
a scientific law without directly interrogat- 
ing nature. The sensationalist, however, 
will of course not rest satisfied with this. 
If we admit that thought abstractions, up 
to a certain point, are derived in an 
intelligible way from sense experience, 
then we ought not to stop here arbitra- 
rily, but clearly should go on and see if 
the same explanation will not apply to 
the remainder also. Accordingly sensa- 
tionalism has tended more and more to 
encroach on the field which the rationalist 
has marked off as sacred, and has tried 



106 Rationalism, and Sensationalism 

consistently to show how its explanation 
will apply, not in some cases only, but 
in all. 

And whatever opinion may be held 
about his success in this, the sensationalist 
has at any rate the distinct logical advan- 
tage which the possessor of a single prin- 
ciple always has over an opponent who is 
obliged to have recourse to two. The 
consequence has been, as was said before, 
that empiricism has practically been suc- 
cessful in claiming for itself all the wealth 
of actual concrete experience which makes 
up our everyday world, while rationalism 
has had to content itself with a constantly 
restricted realm of very abstract truth, 
which in comparison with the other may 
easily be made to appear as hardly worth 
the pains. And even if we think that the 
interests which it involves are, on the con- 
trary, not trivial, but vastly important, it 
still has to pay the penalty of its abstract- 
ness. I For no amount of conviction as to 
the absolute correctness of the logical pro- 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 107 

cess of demonstration, can ever be quite a 
satisfactory basis for a belief in the exist- 
ence of God, or in those other facts which 
philosophical as well as religious interests 
demand. The whole thing is too far from 
our practical concrete life and feelings ; it 
seems to lack the substantialness which 
belongs to the proof we demand in other 
spheres ; and while we may not be able to 
disprove, or even, perhaps, to doubt, those 
axiomatic truths on which the whole argu- 
ment depends, yet the necessity of basing 
everything on the evidence of a few ab- 
stract statements which stand by them- 
selves, isolated from the concrete unity 
and body of experience, whose total tes- 
timony we are accustomed to call for if 
we are to have vital and profound convic- 
tion, makes it difficult for us to rest with 
certainty, and to rid ourselves of a linger- 
ing doubt whether, after all, these truths 
which we have been compelled to take 
simply on their own authority may not be 
deceiving us. 



108 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

With this brief statement of the insuf- 
ficiency of ordinary rationalism, we may 
pass to the consideration of its rival in 
the field. The philosopher who has 
carried out sensationalism most logically 
and completely is David Hume, and as 
he has a particularly close connection 
with both the preceding and the subse- 
quent course of philosophical develop- 
ment, his work will furnish the most 
convenient point of approach. It has 
been seen how Berkeley gave up the 
ontological substance which had been 
supposed to lie back of a group of quali- 
ties, and so had resolved matter into 
mere states of consciousness, into sensa- 
tions. But Berkeley had never doubted 
that there was a substratum, the mind or 
self, in which these states of conscious- 
ness inhere. Hume now carried the 
analysis a step further. The same rea- 
sons, he said, which prevent us from 
believing in an unknown substance mat- 
ter, tell equally against an unknown sub- 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 109 

stance mind. If we hold strictly to the 
unadorned facts of experience, then we 
shall have to confess that the only thing 
we can rest on, and find solid under our 
feet, is an ever-changing flow of par- 
ticular states of consciousness following 
each other in time. If I examine im- 
partially what I call myself, I find noth- 
ing but these particular conscious facts; 
there may be certain sensations which, 
from their constancy, or for other rea- 
sons, are particularly associated with the 
idea of the self, but these are no ab- 
stract unity, but only sensations among 
others, with their own special place in 
the stream. That there is a sensation 
of red, of pressure, of a sweet taste, of 
these things we can be sure ; that there 
is an apple that is red and sweet, or 
that there is an I who sees and tastes, 
is but an inference, for which philosophy 
furnishes no real justification. 

But now if all that experience contains, 
and all that by the conditions of know- 



110 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

ledge we can ever be assured of, is a 
string of sensations, how are we to 
account for those necessary truths on 
which the rationaUst rehes ? It was 
Hume's criticism of these, and especially 
of the idea of causation, which formed 
his most noteworthy contribution to phil- 
osophical development. The rationalist 
had assumed that there is a necessary 
connection between events, expressed in 
the law that every effect must have a 
cause, and that this is made known by 
an ultimate deliverance of the mind. 
But what, said Hume, do we actually 
find when we look at the matter without 
prejudice t two events following each 
other in time, — this, and nothing more. 
For let any one attempt to describe what 
he thinks this necessary connection is; 
he will find that he cannot frame the 
slightest notion of it. We are accus- 
tomed to speak of the connecting link as 
a ''force," but the concept of force as an 
immaterial something, leaping over from 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 111 

one thing to another, is utterly unthink- 
able; if, on the other hand, force is 
conceived of definitely, and so is repre- 
sented by a sensational element, then we 
have only another sensation, which can- 
not bind anything together. There are 
the two events, represented by sensations, 
one occurring after the other; but more 
than that does not exist. It is evident 
that on the principles of sensationalism 
this is the only possible result. How, if 
I depend simply on experience, can I 
say "must".? I can tell what always 
has been, but there my knowledge ends; 
I cannot say that the same thing will 
happen in the future, or, indeed, any- 
thing more than that it chanced to be 
so in the past. v 

How, then, does it happen that men/S 
so universally have got the notion that 
such a necessary connection exists "i this, 
Hume thinks, does fall within the power 
of experience to explain. Let a thing 
happen in a certain way once, and we 



112 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

may think nothing of it, but let it hap- 
pen in the same way twenty or a hundred 
times, and it is inevitable that we should 
look to see the same order repeated when 
the thing occurs again. There is abso- 
lutely no proof that this will be the case, 
but we naturally expect it will; and this 
natural expectation, aroused by repeti- 
tion, is the sole basis of the idea of 
causation. This explanation applied to 
causation is only a type of similar ex- 
planations by means of which the sensa- 
tionalist school has attempted to account 
for all those ideas whose persistence has 
seerhed to the rationalist to call for a 
special power of mind.- Sensations fol- 
lowing one another in time, and getting, 
by continued repetition, into certain dura- 
ble associations — these are the only postu- 
lates the sensationalist thinks he stands in 
need of in order to explain the world. 

Evidently, in thoroughgoing sensation- 
alism, it is not an easy task to find any 
place for that which is commonly sup- 



Rationalism and Sensationalism II3 

posed to be the chief end of knowledge, 
the getting us into contact with a reahty 
existing beyond the mere sensational ex- 
perience itself; and this suggests the 
most obvious objection to the theory. If 
it is true that we have an immediate 
knowledge of a string of sensations, and 
of nothing besides, the logical result is 
that, so far as we are concerned, the 
particular sensations which we experience 
make up the sum total of the universe. 
From this result, which is technically 
known as solipsism, Berkeley thought he 
was able to escape, though he does not 
make the process altogether clear. But 
so long as we do not deny outright the 
existence of self-evident truths, these may 
be supposed to be available to carry us 
beyond the limited set of sensations 
which we experience, on the ground, 
which, indeed, appears self-evident, that 
these are not self-explanatory, and so 
need some ulterior cause. But by deny- 
ing the existence of such truths, sensa- 



114 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

tionalism of course deprives itself of this 
expedient. Taking it on its own show- 
ing, there seems to be no possible way 
of making it even probable that any- 
thing exists beyond the particular sensa- 
tions as they come and go, either in the 
nature of a material reality, or of other 
selves. If we appeal to that feeling, 
which undoubtedly we have, that a few 
bare sensations are not a sufficient ground 
for existence, and that the continued ap- 
pearance of new sensations, and their 
orderly arrangement, must point to a 
more fundamental reality out of which 
they spring, since they cannot arise out 
of nothing, we are simply calling to our 
aid, in a slightly disguised form, that 
same principle of causation; and we 
have only to recollect that causation is 
a mere subjective expectation which a 
certain repetition of events has given 
rise to, and that not only does it tell us 
of no fact of reality, but there is no con- 
ceivable fact, in the nature of a connec- 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 115 

tion between events, of which it could 
tell us, to see how slender a reed it is 
likely to prove. By no conceivability can 
the bare existence of a certain number 
of facts give us ground for believing that 
anything beyond these facts exists. It 
is clear, however, that this result is some- 
thing which practically it is impossible 
to adopt. Hume saw this as clearly as 
any one, and he admits that just as soon 
as we stop philosophizing, we are com- 
pelled to take back at once all those be- 
liefs which we had set aside, or else we 
should cease to live altogether. A belief 
in other people, at any rate, is an abso- 
lute condition of our action. But surely 
a theory which not only fails to account 
for the things which it is practically im- 
possible for us to doubt, but whose ten- 
dency is directly to deny them, will not 
long allow itself to be accepted as a final 
statement of truth. 

But the same argument will carry us 
even further. On what basis, if sensa- 



116 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

tionalism is true, are we to believe in 
those past sensations even, which are 
essential to the existence of the theory? 
Each sensation stands for itself; it is 
real so long as it exists, and that is all 
we can say of it. But then we should 
be confined just to the particular sensa- 
tion we are now experiencing, and should 
be entirely oblivious to any that had 
gone before. For one sensation to take 
us out of itself, and tell us about others, 
is a function which lies quite beyond the 
power of sensationalism to explain. On 
a sensationalistic basis we might be im- 
mediately conscious of one sensation at 
a time, but when it gave place to another 
it would vanish completely. But in that 
case, while sensationalism might be true, 
it is evident we should have no theory 
about it, for to construct the theory we 
have to get behind the sensation of the 
moment, and grasp, through memory, 
the series as a whole. 

Those relating forms of thought, there- 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 117 

fore, which Hume professed to derive in 
a secondary way from a purely sensational 
experience, and which, consequently, in 
opposition to the rationalist, he decided 
were only a fiction of the mind, and had 
no valid application to the actual world, he 
could in reality so derive only because he 
had smuggled them into his original data. 
Hume pretends that he is talking only of 
isolated sensations, feelings; he really is 
unable to say a word unless he substitutes, 
for mere feeling, a content which already 
is related in various ways ; and relations 
are the work of thought. In order to talk 
even about feelings intelligently, he has to 
presuppose the world of permanent and 
related objects, to which we refer feelings 
as their source. Hume could not have 
made his view so much as plausible, if it 
had not been for his ability to substitute 
quietly the perception of an object for the 
feeling of a sensation, whenever it suited 
his convenience, and so for the tacit pres- 
ence all along in his argument of those 



118 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

ideas which he supposes that he is discard- 
ing, and which the ambiguity of language 
enables him to disguise. 

Such in brief is the essential flaw in the 
sensationalist's position, and other criti- 
cisms would be only an enlargement on 
this ; it may be well, however, to consider 
them a little more in detail, especially as 
they bear upon the relation to psychology 
and to science. Of course sensationalism 
is first of all a psychological theory, and it 
is in this sphere that its chief triumphs 
have been won. And on the whole its in- 
fluence has been distinctly beneficial, for 
it has stood for an immediate appeal to 
experience, rather than for a reliance upon 
hypothetical faculties of the mind. But it 
has been able to set up for a complete 
psychological theory only by ignoring the 
fact, which is involved in the criticism 
above, that the existence of what, for an 
onlooker, would be a number of sensations 
in a series, does not at all account for the 
consciousness of these as a series ; a sue- 



Rationalism and Sensationalism II9 

cession of states of consciousness is a very 
different thing from the consciousness 
of succession, and there is no way of 
getting from the one to the other. 
The consciousness of succession is a fact 
for which sensationalism has no place ; 
sensationalism could only admit it as an 
added fact in the series, another sensa- 
tional element, and that would be of no 
use whatever for the purpose in view, 
which is to get the whole series into a 
unity. There is, then, something more to 
the conscious life than the sensationalist 
takes account of ; it has an intelligible and 
purposive unity, which no description of it 
as a group of sensations adequately rep- 
resents. Indeed, when we think of the 
ordered harmony of the world, and the 
complex interplay of our own rational 
lives, the reduction of this all to a mosaic 
made up of bits of sensation seems almost 
ludicrously untrue, if it is meant really to 
stand for a complete psychology. Accord- 
ingly there comes about a change of 



120 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

attitude which is quite analogous to that 
which has already been described in speak- 
ing of the conception of material interac- 
tion. Since it is impossible to get an 
organic whole which will really explain 
the facts of the conscious life, by taking 
the separate sensations as our ultimate 
data, and simply adding these on one to 
another, it is natural to ask what can be 
accomplished by beginning at the other 
end, and making our starting-point the 
unity of the conscious life, out of which 
the various sensations are differentiated. 
And this is the standpoint which modern 
psychology tends to adopt. It may still 
be that, from a certam point of view^ 
there is no element in the conscious life 
which cannot be given an expression in 
terms of sensation, but this will not mean 
that such a point of view is necessarily a 
final one, or that separate sensations come 
first, and then out of their combination the 
more complex products are built up. On 
the contrary, no sensation can be dis- 



Rationalisjn and Sensationalism 121 

tinguished except as an element in the 
whole ; the unity comes first, and the sen- 
sation stands out from this for some spe- 
cial reason, which depends, not on the 
sensation itself, but on the unitary life of 
which it forms a part. Sensations, there- 
fore, as such, never at any one time make 
up the whole of the conscious life, and if 
they did they could not be recognized as 
sensations; there is always the unitary 
background which, because it is unitary, 
cannot be composed of a mechanical 
aggregate of parts, but must be assumed 
as a postulate before it can be known that 
there are any parts. Out of this the sen- 
sation is differentiated, and without it it 
could neither be recognized, compared 
with other sensations, nor put to any use 
in the economy of the organic experi- 
ence. It is the recognition of this which 
makes Hume's argument against the self 
so futile, in so far as its effect on the aver- 
age mind is concerned. 

The relation of sensationalism to scien- 



122 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

tific inquiry has already been noticed, and 
there will be no need to do more than 
repeat briefly what has been suggested 
before. Here again the connection of the 
theory with science is, historically, a very 
close one, for sensationalism started out 
as a demand that everything should be 
brought back to sensuous experience, as 
opposed to an a priori deduction from 
purely abstract grounds taken on author- 
ity. Nevertheless, at the present stage of 
development which science has reached, 
sensationalism clearly fails to supply it 
with any adequate theoretical basis. This 
failure may be put in two ways. In the 
first place, while sensation may be the 
point from which we start in building up 
a scientific world, yet that world is abso- 
lutely different from its sensational basis. 
It is permanent, whereas sensations are 
transitory ; it is rigidly conformed to law, 
and presents an order altogether different 
from that apparently haphazard order in 
which sensations follow one another. Sen- 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 123 

sationalism, in other words, fails to pro- 
vide any way of getting beyond that 
succession of particular sensations which 
comes to us empirically in actual experi- 
ence, while science demands that the 
world with which it deals should represent 
a reality altogether distinct from this ex- 
perience. It very evidently is supposed 
to exist beyond all actual sensations, but 
the point may be obscured a little by re- 
ducing it to actual or possible sensations, 
as if in this way we were going to avoid 
the necessity of getting beyond sensations 
after all. But these possible sensations 
must have some sort of an existence, must 
be something more than mere figments of 
the imagination, if they are to serve any 
purposes of explanation ; and since vastly 
the- greater number of them never exist as 
actual sensations at all in any human ex- 
perience, they must be supposed to stand 
for something beyond this experience; 
and such a reality, to repeat, sensation- 
alism has no way of attaining. 



124 Rationalism and Sensationalism 

The other thing which science demands, 
and which sensationalism is wholly unable 
to supply, is the element of necessity. 
The scientist works constantly on the 
assumption that his results are strictly 
necessary ; he, of all men, is least able to 
tolerate the notion that there should be 
anything of chance, of contingency, in the 
world; he demands that law should rule 
everywhere and always. But we have 
seen that Hume made it once for all im- 
possible to justify this; if Hume's conten- 
tion is true, we can perhaps state that 
which has been in the past, but as to any- 
thing that has not actually entered into 
our experience we cannot even establish 
a presumption. For with the data which 
he gives us, even that expectation which 
grows up with repetition must be recog- 
nized as a subjective feeling only, of 
absolutely no account as proof. For the 
fact that a thing happens a thousand 
times, does not give rise to the slightest 
probability it will happen so again, unless 



Rationalism and Sensationalism 125 

we assume the very point at issue to start 
with. How can we assert that, by increas- 
ing the number of particular instances 
from which our conclusion is drawn, the 
probability of its validity becomes greater ? 
Only on the ground that, by increasing 
the number of cases, we can feel more 
certain that what we have observed is 
not due to mere chance or accident. 
But this distinction between two alterna- 
tives, causation, or chance, has no mean- 
ing unless we assume a universe governed 
by causation, and the existence of such 
a universe is the very thing we want to 
demonstrate. Granting the distinction, 
it may furnish a practical criterion for 
other inferences, but it never can estab- 
lish the inference which is involved in 
the law of causation itself ; for it is 
clearly impossible to prove anything by 
a process which already involves the 
validity of the thing we want to prove. 



KANT 




KANT 

iN the attempt to discover the 
true nature of reality, we found 
it was impossible to proceed 
far without examining more closely the 
act of knowledge itself. Setting aside 
that element of the problem which con- 
cerns itself with the inquiry as to how 
a fact of experience can refer to some- 
thing beyond itself, in the last chapter 
we had to consider the nature of the 
knowing process as a part of experience, 
and the two types of theory which make 
it to consist in sensation and in thought 
respectively. It appeared that neither 
of these attempts to explain knowledge 
was fully successful. Apparently both 

K 129 



130 Kant 

sensation and thought alike are required 
in any act of knowing; sensation to fur- 
nish the material, and thought to pre- 
vent this from being chaotic merely, and 
to subject it to law. This element of 
law is recognized by the rationalist, but 
recognized in an inadequate way ; by 
separating the principles of thought so 
sharply from experience, he cannot, on 
the one hand, explain their relation 
to sense experience, which as such re- 
mains open to the same objections which 
the sensationalist has to meet; and then, 
too, he has to encounter all the difficulties 
attaching to the notion of a knowledge 
whose source lies altogether outside the 
realm of experience, difficulties which 
modern empiricism has made sufficiently 
prominent. Sensationalism, on the other 
hand, recognizes clearly that such a tran- 
scendental knowledge, regarded as separate 
from experience, is out of the question ; 
its failure consists in putting a too re- 
stricted content into its conception of 



Kant 131 

what experience is. In the criticism of 
sensationalism which has just been given, 
there are, as it may have been noticed, 
two somewhat distinct lines of objection. 
Sensationalism may be attacked, in the 
first place, because it supplies no means 
of getting outside the individual experi- 
ence, to the world of objects which science 
regards as distinct from this. But we 
also may object to it, as giving only a 
partial account of what the individual 
experience itself is like. Mere isolated 
sensations form, as we have seen, no 
experience at all ; thought relations are 
necessary in order to bind this material 
together. Naturally, then, we might 
expect to find the next step in the direc- 
tion of some theory which should recog- 
nize the importance of both factors alike, 
while adjusting them within a larger 
whole ; which should correct sensational- 
ism by allowing the necessity of thought 
relations, but which should regard such 
relations, not as something separate and 



132 Kant 

transcendental, but as an essential con- 
stituent of experience itself : and it is a 
development in this direction which was 
begun by Kant. 

The name of Immanuel Kant must be 
regarded as one of the two or three 
greatest names in the history of philoso- 
phy. The particular results which he 
reached may not be acceptable to us 
now, and we may think that his mode 
of reaching and of stating them was 
cumbersome, technical, and a trifle pe- 
dantic ; but the fact remains that the new 
insight which he gained, and the new. 
point of view from which he approached 
philosophical problems, have dominated 
the whole succeeding course of thought, 
and have proved the starting-point for 
the most fruitful philosophic development 
since the time of Plato and Aristotle. We 
must try to discover what, stripped of its 
technicalities, the real meaning of Kant's 
thought was. 

The starting-point of Kant's philoso- 



Kant 133 

phy, and the problem which he had to 
solve, was, as has been said, this same 
problem which we have been consider- 
ing as the conflict between sensationalism 
and rationalism. Kant started out him- 
self as a rationalist of the most rigorous 
type, a rationalist of the school of Wolff. 
Wolff was one of those fortunate phi- 
losophers who have been persuaded that, 
out of the most abstract propositions of 
logical thought, they have been able to 
deduce a perfect system of truth, which 
demonstrates all those realities which men 
have been accustomed to strive after in 
philosophy, — God, freedom, immortality, 
and the whole scheme and framework of 
the universe. This was on the assump- 
tion, which for some time had been com- 
mon among philosophers, that the ideal 
of a philosophical method was mathe- 
matics or geometry. Mathematics, as we 
have seen, had been used practically in 
science, and had achieved startling re- 
sults ; and it was natural that it should 



134 Kant 

thereupon be transferred to philosophy 
as well. Now what struck men first in 
the method of geometry was that, start- 
ing from certain admitted premises, you 
could deduce, and be demonstratively sure 
of your deduction of, a great number of 
new mathematical relations. It was ex- 
actly the same thing that Wolff, and 
after him Kant, tried to do in the realm 
of ontological and cosmological truths. 

Kant came to a recognition of the 
fruitlessness of all these endeavors, by 
convincing himself of the fact, which 
had escaped the notice of his prede- 
cessors, that, in reality, there is an essen- 
tial difference in the way in which men 
had gone to work in metaphysics, and in 
geometry. For geometry, as opposed to 
metaphysics, was constantly falling back 
on at least the spatial form of sensuous 
experience. The geometrician, that is, 
gets his results by constantly envisaging 
space relations, and by drawing lines, 
actually or ideally, to show him what 



Kant 135 

these relations are ; he does not deduce 
his conclusions from his axioms and prop- 
ositions barely as intellectual truths. But 
in metaphysics no such appeal is made. 
As soon as we are in possession of this 
distinction, we are able to recognize, what 
indeed is noticeable enough, that the 
solidity of achievement, and continuous- 
ness of development, which we see in 
mathematics, seem in philosophy almost 
wholly wanting. We may infer, there- 
fore, that it is just this relation which 
it bears to the spatial form of sense 
experience that gives mathematics its ad- 
vantage over metaphysics, and enables it, 
instead of stopping with merely analytic 
propositions, to be all the time advanc- 
ing to something new ; and that, conse- 
quently, mathematics furnishes no analogy 
by which a purely rational treatment- of 
philosophy can be justified. On the con- 
trary, this recognition of the difference 
involved is fatal to the claim which 
rationalism makes. 



436 Kant 

^^XTonfronted by this outcome, Kant next 
turned, as other philosophers had done, 
to empiricism, in order to find the origin 
of those necessary truths from which he 
hoped to satisfy his longing for a know- 
ledge of the eternal interests of man. 
But here again he was met by Hume, 
who proved to him that it is just such 
necessary and universal truths, as, e.g., 
the universality of causation, which ex- 
perience is entirely unable to explain. 
Now Hume had stopped here, and left 
the matter so ; Kant went beyond him 
by noticing, what already has been men- 
tioned as a difficulty in the way of sen- 
sationalism, that on such an outcome no 
ground is left for scientific certainty. If, 
Kant said, Hume's sensationalism is the 
end of the matter, then it is utterly out 
of the question for us to say that any- 
thing must be so ; we can say that it 
always has been so in the past, but 
there the thing must drop. But now as 
a matter of fact we have two sciences, 



Kant 137 

mathematics and physics, in which such 
necessary a priori judgments are con- 
stantly made. To give up the splendid 
results of science is impossible; if, then, 
we cannot be content to accept a theory 
which takes away their foundations, we 
must search further, and ask ourselves 
what conditions are required to serve as 
a secure basis for these results which 
every one admits. How, in other words, 
is it possible to pass a judgment which 
does not simply state the results of what 
we have learned in the past, but which 
adds to our knowledge, and which yet, 
in spite of the fact that it goes beyond 
what we have already experienced, can 
be said to be, not probably, but neces- 
sarily and universally true } Such was the 
question which Kant put to himself. 

The answer which he gives is suffi- 
ciently long and detailed, and in very 
large part can be left to the advanced 
student of philosophy; it is the essential 
attitude which Kant adopts in which we 



138 Kant 

are interested here. It has already been 
noticed that the problem of knowledge 
involves two pretty distinct questions, — 
the possibility of a reference in knowledge 
to reality lying beyond the experience 
of the one who knows, and existing on 
its own account, and, on the other hand, 
the nature of knowing as an experience, 
and the peculiar part played within this 
by the sensuous data and the governing 
principles of thought, respectively. It 
is one of Kant's merits that he began 
the process of disentangling these two 
problems, and so rendered possible a 
fruitful treatment of each of them, 
though it was the latter one to which 
he himself gave the most of his atten- 
tion. This, therefore, is what we shall 
consider first. 

We must remember what the ordinary 
treatment of the part played by thought 
in knowledge has for the most part 
been. Thought and sense have been 
looked upon, in the more or less com- 



Kant 139 

mon-sense way of viewing the matter, 
as two separate sources of authority, each 
valid in its own sphere, which is more 
or less distinct from that of the other, 
and each referring to facts of reality 
already existing by themselves in some- 
thing the same form in which they are 
known. The difference is that the 
facts revealed by sense are contingent 
and empirical merely, while those re- 
vealed by thought are necessary, and, 
metaphysically, of much greater impor- 
tance, as giving us an account of reality 
in its essential structure. Now Kant 
undertook to show that thought, in this 
meaning of the term in which, as ab- 
stract, it stands opposed to sense data, 
does not by itself tell us about reality 
at all; that the only valuable question 
is. What part does thought play within 
experience ? not, What reference does it 
bear to truth lying beyond ? for there 
is no sphere of truth beyond experience 
to which it corresponds. Or, to put it 



140 Kant 

as an answer to the question about the 
possibility of necessary judgments, Kant 
found the necessity he was in search of, 
not as something in nature, which is 
then reproduced and known in our ex- 
perience, but as something in experience 
which itself constitutes what we know 
as nature. He reached this conclusion 
in the following way. Suppose we take 
a geometrical truth ; how now can we 
say, absolutely and without exception, 
that the sum of the angles of any tri- 
angle will equal two right angles } Not 
from experience ; that would tell us that 
the proposition was true of all the tri- 
angles we had examined in the past, 
but not that it would prove to be true 
of the next one we might happen to 
meet. If it be as true as you please 
about triangles in their own proper 
existence, yet triangles can only come 
into our experience one by one, and by 
this process we could only tell the facts 
about the particular triangles we had 



Kant 141 

run across up to date, not about the 
rest which as yet had not come into 
contact with us. The necessity, that is, 
in so far as we can talk of necessity, 
cannot He in reality as it exists in itself 
apart from our experience, for since we 
cannot grasp the whole of infinite reality 
at once, and since it is the conviction of 
a necessary connection in our experience 
that is to be justified, the coming of 
reality piecemeal into experience gives 
us no ground for asserting anything 
whatever of that which still is left out- 
side. What follows then.? Simply this, 
that if we grant the validity of neces- 
sary judgments at all, it must be 
founded on the nature of our experi- 
ence, not on the nature of the reality 
that is known. If, that is, our experi- 
ence is of such a nature that nothing 
can enter into it without taking on a 
particular form, then we can say, with 
certainty, that everything, in the future 
as well as in the past, must have just 



142 Kant 

this form and no other; we can pass, 
in other words, a necessary, synthetic 
judgment a priori, and on no other con- 
dition can we do so. This necessary 
form which outer sense material must 
take, and which renders mathematics 
possible, is space, while time, again, is 
the form of the inner sense. No mat- 
ter what may be true of reality beyond 
experience, we can be perfectly sure that, 
for us, all experience will correspond to 
geometrical truths, because, unless it suc- 
ceeds in taking on the spatial form on 
which geometry is based, it will not 
form part of our experience at all, but 
will forever remain shut out from our 
knowledge. 

In precisely the same way we are to 
account for those other necessary judg- 
ments, the intellectual ones. How can 
we be sure, e.g., that every effect must 
have a cause, or that there must always 
be a substance underlying qualities.'' 
simply because our intellectual machin- 



Kant 143 

ery is so constituted that it will take 
no grist which does not adapt itself to 
these particular forms of substance and 
causality. A necessary judgment is pos- 
sible, for the reason that we are not 
judging about things in themselves, but 
about the necessary connection of ele- 
ments in our own experience; and we 
could have nothing that it would be 
possible to call experience, if it were 
not for certain necessary forms of re- 
lationship between the elements which 
make it up. In other words, if I am 
to be an intelligent being, and have an 
experience which also is intelligible, this 
experience must be to a certain degree 
coherent. If it is to be my experience, 
it must be a unity; I must somehow be 
present through it all, binding its parts 
together into a whole. It cannot be a 
simple string of feelings succeeding one 
another in time, for, as we saw in criti- 
cising sensationalism, such a series would 
have no knowledge of itself as a unity : 



144 Kant 

it is the " I " which binds these feeUngs 
together by threads of intellectual rela- 
tionships, which are not themselves a 
part of the series at all. This cohe- 
rency in my life implies not merely that 
groups of fleeting sensations should exist, 
but it also necessitates that I should be 
able to recognize these, and so that 
they should stand for objects that are 
identical and permanent; and a per- 
manent object already involves the 
category of substantiality. Permanence 
requires that we should have a con- 
sciousness of succession, and we have 
seen that this is something that a mere 
succession of states of consciousness can 
never give, and that it needs some sort 
of conscious unity to bind the states of 
consciousness together, a unity which is 
not itself a member of the temporal 
series. Then, too, the different objects, 
if they are to form part of a single ex- 
perience, must be reciprocally connected 
with one another, members of a common 



Kant 145 

world; and, again, the past and future 
must have some intelligible and neces- 
sary relation, since they also are parts 
of a single experience, in every point 
of which I find myself equally present; 
and so we need the categories of reci- 
procity and causality, as tools which the 
self necessarily requires to help it unify 
its life. Beyond our experience these 
categories may not apply ; but since it 
is only such elements of reality as will 
fit the mould in which our intellectual 
nature is cast, that in any wise concern 
us, we can take the laws as absolute. 
It is not, then, nature which imposes its 
necessity upon us, but it is we who give 
laws to nature. The truths of the ra- 
tionalist are not revelations of existence 
beyond; they show instead our own in- 
tellectual make-up. They are the forms 
of experience, as over against its con- 
tent. 

For Kant, consequently, thought is no 
longer, as with the rationalist, something 



146 Kant 

that occupies a special field of its own 
alongside sensational experience ; there is 
no such thing as a purely sensational ex- 
perience, which thought relations do not 
already help to constitute. The sensation- 
alist had tried to make out that bare 
sensations come first, and that thought is 
afterwards imposed as a superstructure 
upon them. Kant met this by showing 
that any statement we can make, even the 
very arguments by which such a result 
is reached, already presuppose what they 
want to prove. There is absolutely no piece 
of experience which goes beyond a mere 
momentary and inarticulate feeling, and 
so no experience at all that philosophy 
can take account of, which does not al- 
ready show thought relations bound up 
in it. An original state of pure subjec- 
tivity is a fiction ; from the very start 
experience is objective, the experience 
of a cosmos. And an inquiry into the 
nature of the most essential of these 
thought relations which are found in all 



Kant 147 

experience, constitutes a chief part of 
Kant's work. 

With this somewhat brief and summary 
statement of Kant's doctrine, we may 
pass on to an important consequence 
of it which still remains to be mentioned. 
It is quite essential, if we are to under- 
stand Kant, to grasp clearly at the start 
a distinction between two possible ways 
in which such terms as "nature" and the 
"objective world" may be used. When 
Kant says that we ourselves constitute 
nature, he does not mean, as at first we 
might naturally be inclined to suppose, 
that the great fabric of reality which, in 
our ordinary way of viewing the world, 
we think of as existing eternally, and 
as forming the ground out of which we, 
as transient beings, have sprung, first 
gains the right to be by coming under 
subjection to certain rules which our 
mind imposes ; that we create all that 
is, as the subjective idealist might main- 
tain. This is one sense of the term 



148 Kant 

"objective world," — that eternal and fun- 
damental background which we are ready 
to believe exists alongside and beyond our 
transient human experience. But we may 
take another point of view from this. 
Suppose I look back on any section of 
my experience, that, e.g., through which 
yesterday I passed. Now within this 
experience, as an experience, there is 
represented, quite distinct from the "me " 
which is only one special element of it, 
the world in which I live and move, and 
the other men and women with whom I 
come in contact. I walk down a street, 
I enter a house, I sit down to dinner, 
I converse with this man or that. It is 
true that afterwards I think of it all as 
my experience, and I suppose that the 
reality of the house and table and men 
was not exhausted in their existence as 
a part of this experience, but that they 
also were in possession of an existence 
of their own ; but even as my experience 
it was not a chaos of subjective sensa- 



Kant 149 

tions, but an objectively ordered whole, 
of which other men and things consti- 
tute just as real a part as I myself do. 
Now it is nature in this sense of which 
Kant speaks when he says that w^e con- 
stitute the world; it is the world as it 
has an existence within human experience, 
the house as it plays a part in my life, 
and then passes out again to give place 
to something else, not the house as it 
exists on its own account, independently 
of human activities. 

It is to be noticed, therefore, that when 
Kant speaks of experience, and of the 
objective world as an element in expe- 
rience, he always means the individual 
experience, and it never occurs to him to 
doubt that beyond this lies a more ulti- 
mate reality on which the individual ex- 
perience is based. To be sure, this 
individual experience is not the mere 
empirical self that can be completely de- 
fined as a succession of states of conscious- 
ness in time, for we have seen that these 



150 Kant 

latter are only real as they are moulded into 
a coherent unity by the spontaneous and 
unconscious action of a higher Ego, which 
is present in all of them alike, and so is 
itself in some sense out of time; and the 
distinction between this "higher" Ego, 
and the empirical self, opened up a 
problem which, in the confusion which 
still existed in Kant's theory of know- 
ledge, introduces a good deal of ambi- 
guity at times into his statements, and 
paves the way for the later idealism of 
his followers. Still the concrete basis of 
all that Kant is talking about, as he for 
the most part recognizes himself, is that 
unity of experience which ordinarily is 
regarded as making up an individual 
life, taken, of course, not as a mere 
string of sensations, but as an intelligi- 
ble unity, within which there is repre- 
sented a world of things and other selves. 
But it also follows from Kant's doctrine 
that, as regards the nature of the ulti- 
mate reality which lies beyond experience, 



Kant 151 

we must forever remain, intellectually at 
least, in the profoundest ignorance. For 
everything that can enter into our expe- 
rience is incurably affected by the nature 
of our own mind, which throws all its 
knowledge into the form of space and 
time; and these forms, as merely subjec- 
tive, make it forever impossible that we 
should know how the real exists in its 
own proper nature, when subjective forms 
are laid aside. The claims of rationalism 
to grasp reality are defeated by the in- 
dissoluble connection of thought with the 
material of sense. Rationalism had sup- 
posed that thought is an independent 
faculty that can work by itself; Kant 
showed, on the contrary, that for any 
concrete act of knowledge, thought and 
sense are both alike required. Sense 
material alone is blind and unordered, it 
is not experience at all in an objective 
sense ; thought by itself is empty, a mere 
form, which requires a content before the 
terms "true" and "false" can be applied 



1 52 Kant 

to it. This is the answer to the query- 
why, even though it be true that, strictly, 
the nature of knowledge only enables us 
to speak of necessity in connection with 
our experience, there might not be a 
possibility, at least, that ultimate reality 
also corresponds to this same necessary 
law which our mental life reveals ; a 
correspondence between reality and the 
thought laws is out of the question, be- 
cause the thought forms by themselves 
are mere abstractions, only half of what 
is necessary for valid knowledge. 

Let us consider, then, just what Kant 
has accomplished. First of all, he has 
shown that experience is far more than 
the sensationalist had suspected; instead/, 
of being a host of individual sensations, 
it is an intelligible unity, within which 
all the elements are related to each other 
so as to form an organic whole. And on 
this basis he is able to effect a certain 
reconciliation between sensationalist and 
rationalist. With the sensationalist, he 



Kant 153 

denies that it is possible to get beyond 
experience ; but within experience we are 
not confined to a statement of what has 
been, but we are able to pass necessary 
judgments as to what the general nature 
of subsequent experience must be. In 
other words, while we cannot say that 
this particular event is necessarily con- 
nected with that particular event, we can 
say that nothing which does not enter 
into an intelligible relationship to the rest 
of experience can ever exist for us, since 
experience means nothing except as it 
forms an intelligible whole. We have, 
that is, in so far as reality is of the nature 
of experience, a rational basis for those 
necessary ties between events which 
science demands, although this does not 
determine what the connections are in 
particular. But at least there is the 
advantage that we have not rendered, as 
sensationalism does, the possibility of 
such necessary connections unintelligible. 
We cannot say that no event can take 



154 Kant 

place in the world of reality without a 
cause, but we can say that it is impossi- 
ble for us to carry out the demand which 
is laid upon us as reasonable beings, and 
explain rationally any event, except as 
we bring it into that relation to the rest 
of the world which is represented by the 
category of causation. While, however, it 
is only with reference to our experience 
that this necessity holds, Kant did not 
give up the notion of a reality beyond 
experience. It will be seen that, in 
one respect at least, he has retained 
the old dualism of mind and matter; 
there is still the mind or self with its 
laws, and the outer world which in some 
way supplies this with the data of sense. 
And not only the outer world, but the 
self also, is in its real nature unknown ; 
it is only as the two come together and 
produce the concrete facts of experience, 
that we get anything that is accessible 
to knowledge. We have, then, a limited 
field of concrete experience, bounded on 



Kant 155 

each side by unknown tracts; and it is 
according as one or the other of these 
aspects of Kant's thought is emphasized, 
that we get the two main streams of 
development that flow from him. By 
recognizing the existence of things-in- 
themselves, Kant opens up the problem 
of epistemology, in the form in which it 
deals with that which has been spoken 
of as the external reference in knowledge ; 
and on this side of his thought he has 
given the impulse which has resulted in 
neo-Kantian agnosticism. But while he 
always stubbornly maintained that such 
an extra-experiential reality was an in- 
dubitable fact, yet the whole logic of his 
doctrine renders it impossible to hold to, 
and the practical result of his most char- 
acteristic labors was to transfer the prob- 
lem from the consideration of such things- 
in-themselves, to an inquiry into the 
factors which enter into actual experience. 
Even here the dualism with which Kant 
started he never wholly overcomes; the 



156 Kant 

sense material and the governing laws 
of thought stand out as in some degree 
distinct, and as needing to be brought 
together by external means. Neverthe- 
less, by bringing down the problem from 
the heavens to the earth, and by look- 
ing for its solution in the verifiable facts 
of experience, the possibility of a more 
organic treatment was now given. On 
this side Kant's thought has been the 
source of objective idealism, or Hegelian- 
ism. And it is this latter development, 
as the most direct and the most important 
outcome of Kant's influence, that will be 
examined in the following chapter. 



HEGEL 



HEGEL 




'HE connection between the two 
sides of Kant's doctrine, his 
analysis of the facts of expe- 
rience, and his recognition of things- 
in-themselves, was not a logical one. 
Logically, as events show, he ought to 
have ceased to hold to the latter, and it 
was only his strong feeling for reality 
which prevented him from doing this. 
It was very quickly pointed out, however, 
that his position was inconsistent. The 
idea of cause, he had said, holds solely 
within experience ; it tells us nothing 
whatever about things-in-themselves, and 
is empty and abstract so long as it is not 
supplied with the material of sense. But 
159 



160 Hegel 

why do we believe in things-in-themselves 
at all ? Practically because the material of 
sense finds no explanation within experi- 
ence, and requires to be furnished from 
without, or, in other words, to have an 
outside cause. This was the assumption 
of rationalism, that the possibility of this 
external reference in knowledge was to 
be explained, if at all, by having re- 
course to a deliverance of the rational 
nature; and although Kant's principles 
forbade him still to hold this explanation, 
yet as it never occurred to him to go be- 
hind it, and inquire whether there might 
not be some different way of reaching the 
same result, he had no other account 
of the process to suggest. And conse- 
quently, while he felt that he was in the 
right, and to the end refused to give up 
his belief, he really had no answer to 
make when it was pointed out by his 
critics that he was requiring us to hold 
that we are led to a supersensible reality 
through the category of cause, at the same 



Hegel 161 

time that this category is declared to have 
no possible application to such a reality. 

The main line of development from 
Kant was, therefore, consistent in drop- 
ping things-in-themselves quietly, and in 
confining itself, as Kant also had done in 
practice, to the reality of experience. It 
will not be necessary to trace the growth 
of idealism through Kant's various suc- 
cessors, but we may pass at once to the 
last and greatest of them, — to Hegel 
and Hegelianism. 

There has been no more subtle and 
baffling thinker in all the history of 
thought than Hegel. Most of his critics, 
in the opinion of his followers at any rate, 
have wholly missed his point, and even 
among those who call themselves disciples 
there has been a disheartening difference 
of opinion as to what Hegel really meant. 
The difficulty has to some extent been 
due to the fact that Hegel has never 
taken the trouble to state, precisely and 
unambiguously, the peculiarity of his own 



162 Hegel 

point of approach to philosophical prob- 
lems, in its distinction from the common- 
sense standpoint, and that, consequently, 
when we interpret his words by the mean- 
ing they might naturally bear in ordinary 
speech, as many of his opponents have 
done, we are landed in confusion, and are 
able neither to do justice to his great 
merits, nor to put our finger definitely on 
his weaknesses. In what follows I shall 
have to be understood as giving my own 
interpretation of Hegel, which there will 
be no room, of course, to substantiate in 
detail ; and I shall try to show that, on 
this view, Hegel is to be criticised on the 
ground, not so much that his results are 
untenable, as that, while they are valid 
from a certain standpoint, that standpoint 
itself is not the ultimate one, but requires 
to be reinterpreted in a larger setting. 
We thus come back again to the definition 
of metaphysics as a criticism of points of 
view. 

It must be remembered that Hegel ac- 



Hegel 163 

cepts unreservedly the position of Kant's 
successors, and drops all reference to 
things-in-themselves without further cere- 
mony. It is self-evident to him that 
philosophy has to do with experience, and 
experience alone; and, indeed, it may be 
asked with a good deal of force, what 
possible concern we can have with any- 
thing that lies beyond experience. Hegel, 
however, does not agree with Kant in 
holding that this experience is the sub- 
jective experience of an individual; phi- 
losophy for him deals directly with the 
Absolute. But what, then, does Hegel 
mean by the Absolute } and what is the 
relation in which it stands to Kant's in- 
dividual experience } It is just this which 
forms the crux of the whole Hegelian 
system, and which it is peculiarly difficult 
to grasp so long as we keep to the ordi- 
nary common-sense way of looking at the 
world. In trying to understand it, let us 
put ourselves as much as possible in 
Hegel's own position. 



164 Hegel 

Kant, as we have seen, had made a revo- 
lution in the method of philosophy. In- 
stead of regarding the world as an existing 
fact, which stood ready made, and only 
waiting to be recognized, he had declared 
that the world is constructed by the self, 
and so had put the self at the centre of 
the problems of philosophy. In doing 
this, he was simply giving philosophical 
expression to an intellectual movement 
which was far more widespread than tech- 
nical philosophy, and which was repre- 
sented in the growing recognition that the 
world of reality which men find, in the 
first place, round about and seemingly 
independent of them, crystallized in the 
form of political and social institutions, 
and even of scientific knowledge and of 
religious beliefs, is not a mere objective 
fact, which is forced upon men by external 
authority, and to which they have to fit 
themselves; but that it has all grown 
directly out of human needs and human 
activities, to which it must come back if it 



Hegel 165 

is to find its explanation and its justifica- 
tion. The world of experience is the crea- 
tion of man, and it is a creation which is 
an essential part of his nature, not some- 
thing which he can take or leave as he 
pleases. It is not, however, created by 
man in any conscious or arbitrary way, as 
the statement might seem at first to imply. 
Civilization is no conscious product of 
individual self-seeking ; it is something of 
which we can only say that it "just grew." 
This is recognized by Kant in his doctrine 
of the transcendental unity of appercep- 
tion, that somewhat mysterious " higher 
self," which, by its use of the various cat- 
egories, unconsciously creates for itself 
the objective world to which the empirical 
"me" belongs. While, however, Kant 
gave expression, in his philosophy, to this 
notion of the supremacy of the self, he 
did not succeed in working it out and 
stating it except in a very formal and in- 
adequate manner. It is, indeed, only as 
they are bound together in this " unity of 



166 Hegel 

apperception " that the categories can do 
their work; in other words, the action of 
the thought forms in creating an objective 
world is only possible, so long as this 
world forms part of a unitary conscious 
whole, an experience of which one part 
can be connected with another, for the 
reason that it all alike is mine. But the 
nature of this higher self remained ob- 
scure, and the various categories were 
left side by side, with no more vital rela- 
tionship to one another than is implied 
in their all being alike connected with the 
Ego. Then, too, besides the categories 
there was the material of sense, and this, 
although it was necessary to the reality 
of experience, was regarded as coming 
from a wholly different source. How, 
now, could the world of experience, which 
the Ego creates, be given a concrete, not 
a purely formal, unity .'' how could the 
self be characterized, not as abstract and 
distinct from the world, but through and by 
means of its creation.? — such, in a general 



Hegel 167 

way, was Hegel's problem. Or, put less 
technically. What is the principle of unity 
in life ? For with Hegel the purely ab- 
stract side, such as found expression in 
Kant's analysis of the thought categories, 
was not the ultimate problem, though it 
was an important part of it. Between 
Kant and Hegel had come, for one 
thing, the brilliant Romantic movement, 
by which the latter had been influenced ; 
and it was in those concrete products of 
human activity to which the Romanti- 
cists had called attention, art, religion, 
and the other rich fruits of civilization 
and culture, that Hegel's final interest 
lay, much more obviously than Kant's 
had done. Once more, Hegel did not 
bother himself about reality that exists 
unknown and beyond experience ; what 
he was interested in was life itself. And 
if, as Kant declared, the world is the 
creation of the self, reality will be just 
this process of continuous creation which 
life presents. The task of philosophy, 



168 Hegel 

therefore, will be to find, as Kant him- 
self had failed to do, some unitary prin- 
ciple which the process of reality reveals, 
and which will enable us to interpret it. 
But is, then, this process one of merely 
individual, or even of human experience, 
in the ordinary sense? The answer was 
suggested by Kant's own doctrine of the 
transcendental self. Is not the world, 
and mankind, am not I myself, only real 
for this more inclusive unity which knows 
us all? There would be no knowledge 
of an individual as such, if he had not 
already come within a conscious unity 
transcending his mere individuality; and 
therefore this larger reality, of whose 
knowledge the individual forms only a 
part, cannot be itself an experience which 
is merely individual. If the real " I " were 
not larger than the empirical self, it never 
could know this latter as part of a more 
inclusive world. My self, my true and 
complete self, carries me, when I come 
to work out its implications, far beyond 



Hegel 169 

the limits of anything I can call subjec- 
tive; in the last resort, it has relations 
which are coextensive with the universe, 
all of which relations are essential to its 
being. Or it may perhaps be clearer if 
we substitute for the word ** self " the con- 
cept of ''experience," since, after all, it 
only is the unity of experience for which 
this notion of the "higher self" stands. 
Everything of which we can speak at 
all is, in some sense at least, an element 
within experience, and in this sense ex- 
perience extends far beyond the mere 
subjective self. I am only a point in the 
midst of the vastly larger world of men 
and things which experience presents. 
And in this way Hegel can answer Kant's 
claim that experience is subjective : how 
can experience belong to a self which is 
itself an element within experience } The 
self enters as an element into experience 
only under certain peculiar conditions ; 
if, e.g.^ I am engaged in a very absorb- 
ing pursuit, there is no recognition of 



170 Hegel 

myself, I lose myself, as we say; and 
consequently the self is less fundamental 
than the whole process out of which it 
arises. And this whole inclusive process 
of experience, within which all the spe- 
cial distinctions which we recognize by 
thought arise, is what Hegel means by 
the Absolute, or God. 

With this general statement as to 
Hegel's standpoint, we need to consider 
a little more closely the relation which 
his treatment of the abstract thought 
categories bears to it. And in order to 
follow Hegel's thought, let us go back 
again to the results of Kant's inquiry. 
Up to Kant's time, metaphysicians had 
been in the habit of taking the general 
categories of abstract thinking, such as 
substance and causation, and without any 
special examination of them had applied 
them forthwith as an instrument for get- 
ting the particular bit of information 
about ultimate reality which each of them 
happened to afford. Kant had put phi- 



Hegel 1 71 

losophy on another track. Instead, he 
said, of using your instrument at once, 
you should first examine it; you should 
turn your attention from ultimate exist- 
ence to the relation which your thought 
bears to the rest of the experience with 
which it is connected. A start was thus 
made towards understanding the thought 
forms, not as isolated dicta, but as organi- 
cally related to one another and to life. 
Kant, however, as we have said, had left 
the process of experience still more or 
less disjointed ; not only were sense and 
thought referred to different principles, 
but the different thought forms them- 
selves were only very loosely connected. 
What Hegel set out to do was to make 
the unity organic. Life is not made up 
of isolated acts of thought, each telling 
you about some particular item, but it 
is in a real sense a whole. You can- 
not, therefore, understand any of these 
thought abstractions which you are con- 
stantly using, — being, quality, substance 



172 Hegel 

and attributes, force, and the like, — unless 
you examine its relationships, see what 
particular service it performs in the liv- 
ing whole of experience, and then inter- 
pret it with reference to that. In his 
Logic, then, Hegel tries to show that 
the different categories which we use in 
thinking are thus connected with each 
other in a vital way, from the most ab- 
stract of them, pure being, to that which 
is most adequate to the nature of reality; 
and that we cannot isolate any by itself, 
and take it out of its connection. Each 
thought form, when we examine it care- 
fully, is found to imply all the others, 
and in the law of their development 
which he detects, in accordance with 
which they are connected with one an- 
other in a continuous growth, Hegel dis- 
covers that principle of unity in life 
which is the goal of his philosophy, and 
its most characteristic feature. Accord- 
ing to this law, stated for the present in 
a purely formal way, everything falls 



Hegel 173 

into a general schema that is made up of 
three terms. The first term, if taken as 
absolute, and as intelligible in itself, 
shows its inadequacy by suddenly nega- 
ting itself, and turning over into its oppo- 
site; and then a third term comes in to 
unite the first two in a synthesis which, 
without suppressing either of them, is 
enabled to do justice to both, by taking 
away their independence, and reducing 
them to mere elements or moments in 
this larger whole. 

But while this general contention of 
Hegel's, that the concepts, or forms of 
abstract thought, which we use, are to 
be understood only by reference to their 
place in the whole of experience, may 
not seem altogether unintelligible, it is 
not easy to be quite sure what he means 
when he interprets this, apparently, as a 
complete metaphysic, an account of the 
ultimate nature of reality itself. Instead 
of saying that reality is experience, Hegel 
more often says that reality is thought, 



174 Hegel 

and it has accordingly been supposed that 
he means by this abstract thought, to the 
exclusion of sensation, and of immediate 
concrete life. Hegel is expressly on his 
guard to deny that he means by thought 
ordinary finite thinking, and so we may 
set this aside without further remark. It 
is easier to interpret him as meaning 
that reality is made up of these abstract 
thought relations with which the Logic 
deals, hypostasized in some fashion, and 
given an independent existence. The 
difficulties in the way of this are so obvi- 
ous that it is not necessary to dwell upon 
them. What a reality is that is com- 
posed of relations, without anything to 
relate, no one ever has succeeded, or ever 
will succeed, in making plain. It is quite 
impossible to drop out that sensational 
element which makes experience con- 
crete, and reduce everything to what an 
eminent contemporary thinker, in speak- 
ing of this interpretation of Hegel, has 
called an '' unearthly ballet of bloodless 



Hegel 175 

categories." And, indeed, Hegel has too 
many statements that are inconsistent 
with this notion to afford us very much 
justification in attributing it to him. 
While, however, he may not hold that 
there is nothing to reality but abstract 
thought, yet it is very difficult not to in- 
terpret him as saying that at least the 
beginning of the process which consti- 
tutes reality is a development of just 
such abstract thought categories. He 
expressly says that the development 
which he traces in the Logic, from pure 
Being to the Idea or Notion — a develop- 
ment which deals entirely with abstract 
concepts — is not anything that depends 
upon otir thought, but is a growth of the 
subject-matter itself, a growth of reality. 
And we might infer the same thing from 
the relation in which the Logic stands 
to the rest of Hegel's system. There 
hardly seems to be any doubt that Hegel, 
in the latter part of his system, at least, 
intends to take reality, not as anything 



176 Hegel 

that is fixed and present once for all, but 
as the process of development itself. 
This notion of development certainly 
seems essential when he comes to deal 
with Spirit, i.e.^ with the concrete growth 
of humanity as exemplified in social and 
political life and institutions, morality, 
art, religion, and the like. But now in 
the treatment which Hegel gives, there is 
no break in the continuity of the process 
from beginning to end; just as one ab- 
stract category passes over into another 
in the Logic, so, when the end is 
reached, the supreme category passes 
over continously into Nature, and Nature 
into Spirit. So that a natural interpreta- 
tion would be, that Hegel was actually 
trying to develop reality, in its entirety, 
out of mere abstract thought, which thus 
was the beginning and presupposition of 
the whole. We may perhaps suspect that 
Hegel himself never was quite clear about 
the matter, and that in his thought there 
were mixed up more motifs than one. 



Hegel \77 

But however this may be, it is, I think, 
unfair to Hegel to make this the real es- 
sence of his doctrine. There is a far 
more definite conception which will ex- 
plain most of his utterances, and it is 
altogether likely that this is what all the 
time lay back of his thought, even if he 
was not always quite consistent with it. 
On this interpretation, what he really had 
in mind as his absolute reality was, as has 
already been suggested, not abstract logi- 
cal relations, but concrete life. A very 
large part of Hegel's work, that which 
comes under the head of Philosophy of 
Spirit, deals with such concrete reality in 
the realm of what practically amounts to 
a history of civilization, where he tries 
to show how the most abstract categories 
are concretely embodied; and this is, at 
any rate, not consistent with his taking 
thought, in the ordinary sense, as literally 
the sum and substance of the world. It 
would be a fair interpretation of his mean- 
ing, therefore, to treat the Logic, not as 



1 7S Hegel 

the starting-point for his Absolute, but as 
in some sense the mechanism which is 
involved in every part of it. So when 
Hegel says that reality is thought, we 
should understand him as intending to 
say that reality is meaning. When he 
declares that sensation, or immediate ex- 
perience, is unreal as compared with 
thought, he does not mean to deny the 
existence of sensation in favor of mere 
thinking, but only to say that in so far 
as experience is purely immediate and 
unreflective, in so far as the world comes 
to us simply as a brute fact, that is forced 
upon our senses without appealing to our 
reason, it is unreal and abstract, not re- 
ality in its fulness ; and that reality is 
found in the interpreting of this, in find- 
ing out its relations and meaning in the 
process of experience as a whole. 

Let us, in order to know just what we 
are talking about, think of that chain of 
widening experience which makes up our 
own life. Such an experience is a devel- 



Hegel . 179 

opment, which is coming all the time to 
a clearer consciousness of its own mean- 
ing; and this growth, through which ele- 
ments of experience that come to us at 
first as mere facts which we have to ac- 
cept, gradually take on value for our 
lives, are interpreted in their relations, is 
the work of thought, of reason : the more 
rational life is, the more it is real, and it 
is truly real only as it has thus been 
rationalized. If we substitute this word 
"rational" in Hegel's statement that re- 
ality is thought, we shall have more 
nearly what he has in mind. We can un- 
derstand in this way what Hegel means 
when he speaks of the development of 
the thought categories in the Logic, not 
as a mere arbitrary matter of what we 
think about things, but as a self -develop- 
ment, a growth of reality. When we 
take reality simply as the process of ex- 
perience, the question which concerned 
Kant, as to the possibility or impossibility 
of our applying the categories to a tran- 



180 ^ Hegel 

scendental something beyond, no longer 
is important; thought has its sole use as 
it stands for a revelation of the meaning 
of life ; and this constantly progressive 
self-revelation is no arbitrary exercise of 
our subjective faculty of thinking, but a 
necessary development of thought itself, 
i.e., of an experience ever becoming more 
rational and luminous ; or, again, if we 
say that experience is reality, it is a de- 
velopment of reality. This will give a 
concrete meaning to Hegel's threefold 
schema, and his doctrine of negation, 
and of the union of contradictories. 
Since life is a growth, no achievement 
can be taken as final and complete in 
itself; its self-sufficiency has to be denied 
or negated, for by its very success it cre- 
ates new conditions which introduce an- 
tagonisms, and so prevent our going on 
in the same way as before. But that 
does not mean that it is annulled com- 
pletely, or that it passes out of our life, 
but only that, on the basis of it, we are 



Hegel 181 

forced to find some larger conception of 
life that shall reconcile the jarring ele- 
ments, while still allowing them to con- 
tribute their own particular value to the 
result. The richness of life is due just 
to its paradoxes, to the fact that it can 
take up these seemingly contradictory 
elements within itself, and by harmoniz- 
ing, without destroying them, can make 
them minister to its own process of 
growth. 

The abstract thought categories, there- 
fore, would be the instruments by which 
this growth in experience is effected, and 
they are consequently always to be in- 
terpreted by reference to the whole of 
experience which is their presupposition, 
by reference to the process in which they 
occur. Whatever the ultimate interpre- 
tation may be, the justification of Hegel's 
inquiries is found in this, that, at any rate 
as we use it, a thought form, such as 
being, or substance, or quality, or causa- 
tion, grows out of some particular need 



182 Hegel 

of experience which thought is trying to 
meet, and that, consequently, we cannot 
take the category as if its value were al- 
ready perfectly known, but must examine 
its connection and the occasion which 
gives rise to it. And the results which 
Hegel reaches often throw a great deal 
of light on the problems over which phi- 
losophy had been disputing for centuries 
without coming to a conclusion. Take, 
for an example, a thing and its qualities. 
Instead of saying, as earlier philosophers 
had done, that there is an unknown some- 
thing in which qualities inhere, or else 
that there is no such thing, and that iso- 
lated qualities are the only reality, Hegel 
enables us to see that the terms are purely 
relative to each other, and that their use 
grows out of a teleological interest. What 
we call a single thing, whether an atom, 
or a grain of sand, or a sand heap, or a 
world, is determined, practically, by the 
particular end or interest we have in view : 
the unitary thing represents this unity of 



Hegel 183 

end rather than any metaphysical under- 
lying existence, while qualities are the 
various means bound up with the end. 
Or, again, the concept of force. Instead 
of taking force as an entity of some sort, 
Hegel asks when it is the concept is used ; 
and he finds that it is used when, after 
taking some element of experience in an 
isolated way, we discover that it is not 
thus isolated, but has relations with the 
rest of experience, as indeed it must have, 
since it is an element in a single process ; 
but instead of recognizing that this con- 
nection is the original thing, and that it 
is only by an abstraction that we set the 
element off by itself, we invent an exter- 
nal connection, force, to bridge over the 
gulf our own abstracting thought has 
made. In other words, Hegel explains 
the terms with which philosophy deals, 
not as ontological realities, but as tools 
which we use to meet the needs of a 
growing experience. Reality is thought, 
then, means simply this : that reality is 



184 Hegel 

experience in a growing process of real- 
izing its own meaning and value, and 
not content simply to take itself as it 
first comes, without reflection or medita- 
tion. And the Absolute is this whole 
process of growth. 

Instead, then, of being the philosopher 
of abstractions, Hegel is concrete to the 
last degree. Against the abstract in his 
own sense of the term, that, namely, 
which has still got its meaning insufli- 
ciently worked out, he is indeed con- 
stantly waging war. And it is easy to 
recognize the value of his contention. 
To say that the meaning of life is what 
philosophy is concerned with, is to make 
philosophy practical, and is precisely 
the statement with which we started in 
the opening chapter. In trying now to 
show how the standpoint fails to be final 
and satisfactory, we should not lose sight 
of this very great gain. 

It is already evident enough that He- 
gel's method of treatment is, from the 



Hegel 185 

standpoint of previous philosophies, sin- 
gularly elusive in its nature, and it will 
not be an easy task to grasp it with suffi- 
cient firmness to see just its relation to 
our more ordinary way of thinking; but 
if we can succeed in doing this, it will 
itself supply, essentially, the criticism 
which I shall have to offer. And we 
may notice, in the first place, that when 
Hegel finds his Absolute in the self-evi- 
dent reality of Experience, or Life, he 
has no place to give to that which com- 
mon sense means by the outer world, 
when this i^ thought of as existing apart 
from all human experience, as it must 
have existed, for instance, before sentient 
beings made their appearance on the 
earth. The external world can only 
exist, for Hegel, as it comes within ex- 
perience ; and by this Hegel cannot in 
consistency have reference to any hypo- 
thetical experience of an Absolute Being 
distinct from human life, but he must 
mean just the experience which is exem- 



186 Hegel 

plified in that gradual coming to a know- 
ledge of itself on the part of human 
consciousness, with which his system is 
concerned. And so the world, for Hegel, 
is created along with this process by which 
mankind comes to know it. The change 
from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican sys- 
tem was not the subjective recognition on 
the part of men of a fact which had 
existed long before it was thus discov- 
ered ; it represented a real development 
in the objective world, in the only sense 
in which Hegel can speak of such a 
world. Since, however, the . reality of 
the outer world furnishes a hard prob- 
lem in itself, it will perhaps be better 
not to insist upon this point, but to con- 
fine our criticism to the more verifiable 
facts of "experience." Let us, then, no- 
tice two quite distinct things to which 
Hegel's concept of experience might be 
taken to apply. There is, first, what Kant 
called the individual experience. If I 
look back over my own life, it seems to 



Hegel 187 

be made up of a set of concrete activi- 
ties, or experiences, which form a defi- 
nitely limited whole. It begins with my 
first beginnings of consciousness and will 
end with my death, and it is all along 
distinct from the experiences of other 
men ; they may, indeed, know more or 
less about it, but no one but myself can 
live it. Or, on the other hand, we may 
apply the term to the experience of the 
race, to the sphere of universal history, 
which also is a development, and of which 
what I call my life is now only a part. It 
is clear that in these two uses the term 
"experience" is meant to stand for two 
distinct things, and that in both it is used 
quite intelligibly. 

What marks, now, are there which, on 
the ordinary view, distinguish my expe- 
rience from the experience of mankind 
which is expressed in universal history } 
For one thing, while my experience is 
objective, while, that is, it involves other 
men and things beside myself, yet we 



188 Hegel 

generally suppose that it also has a sen- 
sational element which makes it in an 
equally true sense unique and unsharable. 
Every experience of mine is a particular 
fact, which as such is distinct in existence 
from all the other facts in the universe, 
however closely it may be related to them. 
If two men are looking at the same object, 
the similarity of the reference does not 
prevent the first man's experience from 
being quite other than the second man's, 
for the. two sensations involved are facts 
which are forever distinct. And the con- 
tinuity of experience which this sensa- 
tional element gives, and which enables 
us to call a certain set of experiences 
ours, while others, again, are not ours, 
we do not usually imagine to extend be- 
yond the limits of an individual life. My 
life is connected, indeed, with the history 
of the world; the influence which the 
world exerts, both through heredity and 
through my spiritual environment, is 
enough to show this ; but there is not 



Hegel 189 

supposed to be a continuity of conscious- 
ness of the same nature as that which 
is exhibited in my individual experience 
from day to day. On the contrary, social 
development is made up of a host of such 
unitary conscious lives, each, as immediate 
experiences, separate from the others, 
though united with them through a com- 
munity of interests and purposes, and a 
relation to a common world ; there is not 
supposed to be any conscious realization 
of this unity except on the part of differ- 
ent individuals, whereas it is an essential 
element in what we commonly understand 
by a real unity of experience, that it 
should on its own part immediately rec- 
ognize itself as such. This more inclu- 
sive reality comes, indeed, in a way within 
the life of the individual, but it is as some- 
thing which also is known to exist on its 
own account. 

It is an undoubted fact, then, that in 
common thought we mean two very dif- 
ferent things when we speak of an indi- 



190 Hegel 

vidual's experience, and when we speak 
of that growth of experience which is 
shown in the history of mankind ; and 
that both of these, moreover, seem to 
be concrete reahties, of which philosophy 
has to take account. We are, therefore, 
in a position now to ask what attitude 
Hegel adopts towards these two different 
uses of the term, and the distinction we 
invariably recognize between them ; and 
we have a right to demand that he 
should not confuse or ignore that 
difference. 

Let us notice once more what Hegel's 
essential object is. What he is after is 
to show that those distinctions which 
had been taken to denote hard and fast 
separations, in reality do nothing of the 
kind; but that anything we can fasten 
on reveals, when its implications are 
worked out, the unity which is its pre- 
supposition. This unity is the reality of 
development in self-conscious experience. 
Instead of having one reality God, and 



Hegel 191 

another reality the world, and still other 
separate realities, a host of individual 
selves, we have just the one unity of 
experience, which would correspond to 
God ; and everything else can be shown 
to have its existence within this unitary 
conscious process, and to possess no inde- 
pendent reality at all. Now, in general, 
the criticism I shall make is this, that 
Hegel confuses the two meanings of 
experience which have just been noticed. 
I shall try to show that he gets his point 
of view, his method, from what every- 
body else calls the individual experience, 
and that with reference to such experience 
his results are valid; but then he trans- 
fers this, without very clearly indicating 
how, to something quite different, the 
universe of reality, and in this sphere 
his statements will no longer hold true. 
That Hegel gets his method from an 
analysis of individual experience is shown, 
in the first place, by the relation in which 
he stands to Kant. Kant represents the 



192 Hegel 

common-sense standpoint, and he is care- 
ful to state that the experience he is talk- 
ing about, within which the categories 
apply, is the subjective experience of the 
individual, taken, of course, as an intel- 
ligible unity, and not as a mere string of 
conscious states in time ; and Hegel, what- 
ever his interpretation, is evidently in his 
Logic working with just the same facts. 
Now simply to ignore Kant's distinction 
between individual experience and the 
larger world of reality, as Hegel does, 
and to transfer what is meant of the one 
directly to the other, is a proceeding 
which renders it forever impossible to 
justify to common sense the results at 
which we arrive. We have a definite 
idea of what we mean by each, and if 
any one refuses to be content with the 
distinction as an ultimate one, he at 
least owes it to common sense to keep 
clear the fact that, in any case, the dis- 
tinction is made. Let us, then, examine 
again what Kant and other philosophers, 



Hegel 193 

as well as the majority of men who are 
not philosophers, call the conscious life 
experience of an individual, ignoring for 
the moment all other reality whatever. 
And it will be seen that Hegel's state- 
ments apply to it very closely. Such an 
experience is a unity, or else I could not 
speak of it as my life ; and it is a unity 
of development. It is a unity, again, 
which is the presupposition of all those 
distinctions which I call myself, and 
other selves, and the external world; or 
to put it, according to the common-sense 
notion, more exactly, any recognition^ or 
knowledge, of an object, or of myself 
and other selves, must be explained by 
reference to the process of experience 
of which this recognition is a part, and 
by definition we are ignoring anything 
that may be implied in a self or object 
beyond this immediate fact of experience. 
This is nothing but the modern method 
of psychology, which is based on the 
postulate, that, in order to understand 



194 Hegel 

the conscious life, we must start with its 
unity, not with the diversity of its separate 
elements. Any object, in so far as it comes 
within this experience, arises to meet the 
needs of the experience as a whole, and 
disappears when it is no longer required. 
I do not as a rule take notice of an 
object as such, unless it is connected 
with what I am interested in, and this 
interest stands for a wider reach of ex- 
perience than the mere perception of 
the object does, and is needed in order 
to account for it. So also my neighbor, 
or even myself, as elements in my ex- 
perience, are only parts of a whole, and 
they come and go according to psy- 
chological laws which, in the last resort, 
depend upon the one life process. That en- 
tire panorama which passes before my gaze 
when I think of my life experience, from 
its most indefinite beginnings in the infant 
consciousness to the full flow of life in 
manhood, a panorama wherein every con- 
ceivable sort of reality is represented, is 



Hegel 195 

the expression of a single process, which 
has to be regarded as a unity before we 
can explain psychologically any of the 
particular elements within it. And, again, 
it is in such an experience as this that the 
thought categories which Hegel discusses 
in the Logic must find their application. 
Hegel, as we saw, no longer found the 
value of the categories, as the rationalist 
had done, in their ability to give us infor- 
mation about noumenal reality, but rather 
in the practical use which they serve in 
rationalizing experience. And moreover, 
he declares that the development which 
he traces is a real development, and not a 
mere matter of our subjective thought. 
Now it is possible to interpret Hegel's 
treatment in the Logic as if he meant to 
say that reality already exists complete, in 
a form which reveals within itself these 
thought relationships with which the Logic 
deals ; and that they form so thoroughly 
articulated a whole that, if we take the 
very simplest category, we find ourselves 



196 Hegel 

continually led on and on by threads of 
connection, until at last we get intellectual 
satisfaction only when we have arrived at 
the completed system. But if we accept 
this interpretation, we have to admit that 
after all there is no movement in reality 
itself, since this exists complete from the 
start, and that the only development is in 
our ideas about reality, and is due to our 
wholly unjustifiable procedure in attempt- 
ing in the first place to tear away one single 
element of existence from the connection 
in which alone it is real, and to set it off 
by itself. But this seems to be doing just 
what Hegel warns us not to do, reducing 
the development, namely, to a mere sub- 
jective process of thinking about the uni- 
verse. And if we give up the idea of de- 
velopment here, we must do it everywhere 
else also, and without the idea of develop- 
ment, Hegel is no longer Hegel.' How 
can we retain, then, in Hegel's treatment 
of the categories, the idea of growth as an 
essential element.'* We have seen that if 



Hegel 197 

we take him too literally, we must think of 
the Logic as the actual beginning of the 
process which constitutes the Absolute; 
and this notion of thought categories de- 
veloping by themselves in a vacuum is 
much too subversive of our customary 
mental habits to account for the real and 
practical value of Hegel's results. The 
only alternative seems to be, as has been 
suggested, to suppose that Hegel has in 
mind that actual growth in concrete expe- 
rience which, since it is a rationalization of 
life, can only be effected by using the 
thought categories as its tools; and that 
he is trying to show the part which these 
various thought instruments play in the 
unitary process of life. Such a progres- 
sive rationalization of experience must in- 
volve a corresponding evolution in the 
complexity of the categories which are 
used, and so these get their movement 
from the living growth in experience 
which they subserve. But now thought, 
and so the thought categories, in so far as 



198 Hegel 

it serves the purposes of growth in expe- 
rience, is used only to meet particular sit- 
uations in which development is called 
for; and since Hegel had access to no 
kind of reality that other men also were 
not in possession of, there was no place 
where he could look to find the use of his 
categories embodied, when he left gen- 
eralities and came down to the definite 
facts of life, except in concrete, special 
experiences; and it is such definite, 
concrete experiences, in Kant's meaning 
again, which belong to the life of the 
individual. 

Clearly, however, it cannot be such an 
experience as this which Hegel has in- 
tended for his Absolute. The amount of 
conscious activity which we are thus able 
to bring into a unitary connection is com- 
paratively scanty. The rounded whole of 
experience which I call mine of yesterday 
connects with experience of the days and 
months and years before, but as I go 
further back the stream continually nar- 



Hegel 199 

rows, and it only takes a few years to 
bring it to an end. Similarly, I can go on 
in imagination into the future, but here 
again the whole thing, so far as human 
knowledge goes, is ended with my death. 
In order to get beyond solipsism, Hegel 
has to mean, and evidently he does mean, 
what common sense has in mind in the 
growth of experience in the human race, 
from the beginnings of history to the pres- 
ent day, — a reality of which my experience 
is only a very small part. And the only 
manner in which it seems easy to account 
for the off-hand way in which Hegel appar- 
ently passes from one conception to the 
other, using them interchangeably as suits 
his purpose, is to suppose that he has 
failed to note what is for common sense a 
very important distinction. We have seen 
that the individual experience is objec- 
tively constituted, that there are represen- 
ted in it, 'namely, all those elements which 
are to be found in the larger reality of 
which it is a part — the world of external 



200 Hegel 

things, the existence of men and nations, the 
facts of history, and of the growth of civili- 
zation. Otherwise, of course, we should be 
unable to talk about these things. And it 
looks as if, on account of this, Hegel had 
assumed that when we talk of experience 
such as Kant had meant, a set of particu- 
lar experiences in which the world and 
history are represented in terms of know- 
ledge^ we were by that very fact bringing 
the world and history themselves into this 
same unity of experience ; and that no dis- 
tinction, accordingly, needed to be ad- 
mitted, such as we have tried to establish 
above. The presence of a reference to, a 
representation of, realities within a unitary 
process, is taken as sufficient proof that 
the realities themselves are connected, and 
connected in just the same way. Because, 
in a state of consciousness which we call a 
knowing state, the object necessarily im- 
plies a subject, — which simply means, in 
other words, that if I am to know an ob- 
ject, the reference to, the fact of meaning 



Hegel 201 

this object, must come within a unitary 
consciousness, whose being a unity enables 
me to call it mine, — it therefore is con- 
cluded that the object referred to, which is 
quite a different matter, must be a part of 
this same unitary consciousness. But this, 
as was said above, is to ignore a very vital 
difference, the difference between experi- 
encing, and knowing. In so far as the world 
is actually a part of that unity of experience 
which Kant had in mind, it has no exist- 
ence when we cease to be conscious of it ; 
when we mean the real world, however, we 
do not speak of experiencing it directly, 
but of knowing it, and knowledge implies 
the separate existence of the world outside 
the unity of experience in which the know- 
ledge of it plays a part. An object or a 
self, as a part of experience, is only a ref- 
erence to a concrete reality which has its 
own existence; and in this existence it is 
not experienced, in the sense in which we 
can speak of experience, but only known. 
My neighbor's actual thoughts and sensa- 



202 Hegel 

tions and feelings, whatever makes up con- 
cretely his life, are not present in that ex- 
perience of mine in which my neighbor 
plays a part : this as an experience is just 
a reference to the real neighbor, who is all 
the time enjoying his own life. So when 
I think of my own self even, and so my 
self forms an element of experience, this 
real self of actual experiencing lies in the 
past or future, and what is now actually 
present is an allusion to it. It is impos- 
sible, in other words, to keep out of know- 
ledge this transcendent reference to reali- 
ties beyond the knowing experience itself, 
and, in the case of external objects and of 
other selves at least, having no such con- 
nection with it that one can be shown to 
grow out of the other, and to form with it 
a unitary whole. The knowledge of my 
neighbor as an experience forms an actual 
element in the unity of experience which 
makes up my life; the neighbor who is 
thus known, however, does not, so far as 
appearance goes, enter into such a unity. 



Hegel 203 

Will it, then, still be possible in any 
way for Hegel to maintain, of reality as 
a whole, that unity which he declares to 
be a certain and transparent fact? It is 
not, in the first place, at all clear that 
Hegel can even get out of solipsism, and 
justify that which common sense means 
by reality in the larger sense. Since 
Hegel does not recognize the external 
reference in knowledge, but only know- 
ledge as an immediate experience, it does 
not appear how, if he keeps to such ex- 
perience as can be verified, he can ever 
get back of what common sense calls his 
own life. Any object in the external 
world is, for Hegel, exhausted in its 
value for experience ; while it is only 
by taking objects as having an existence 
of their own, that we are enabled to get 
back to history at all, in any sense in 
which this also is not exhausted in our 
own special unity of experience. But 
without dwelling upon this, let us sup- 
pose that we have in some way got at 



204 Hegel 

that which ordinary people mean by 
the growth of experience as represented 
in history as a whole; are we any the 
better off? 

It may be said at once that there is a 
certain application of his principles which 
Hegel makes to the development of soci- 
ety, and makes very successfully. This 
has to do with the tracing of those gen- 
eral social movements which make up 
tlie growth of civilization. The laws 
which govern the transitions of social 
life from the savage state up to modern 
industrial society, the changes by which 
democracy is evolved from a primitive des- 
potism, all the movements whereby the 
spiritual acquisitions of humanity crystal- 
lize into institutions, which play their part 
on the stage of history, only to give place 
in time to other and more adequate ones, — 
facts of this sort very naturally will show 
a connection with those principles which 
govern the growth of the individual life, 
for the reason that social life is real only 



Hegel 205 

in so far as it is embodied in the con- 
crete experiences of individuals. But 
while the results which such a method 
can give are sufficient for sociology, and 
are of very great value in their place, 
they do not settle the metaphysical 
question as to what relation these so- 
called individual lives, as concrete and 
sensational facts, bear to the social whole, 
and, more ultimately, to the universe. As 
applied to social growth, the principles of 
which we now are talking leave the ap- 
parent reality and separateness of indi- 
vidual lives out of their account; they 
profess to deal only with general move- 
ments, which abstract from particular 
men and women. But now the absolute 
reality, or God, is for Hegel a reality 
which is supposed to include, in an intel- 
ligible way, all other reality within its 
own life, and this means that it includes 
finite selves as well. It is, therefore, a 
vital point in Hegel's theory that this con- 
nection should be rendered perfectly clear. 



206 Hegel 

We have seen that the relation of 
the individual experience to the recog- 
nition of selves as they enter into it, 
furnishes just such a conception as 
Hegel is looking for ; taken in this way, 
as a reference, not as the concrete reality 
referred to, the self has ho existence ex- 
cept as, back of it, there is implied the 
one unitary experience to which it be- 
longs. And this seems to be the con- 
ception on which Hegel actually relies. 
It is this concept of experience, Kant's 
individual experience, which alone is so 
obviously a unity for us that we can as- 
sume it without further proof. It is only 
when it is applied to the psychological 
origin of such references within individ- 
ual experience, the origin of our know- 
ledge of things, not the origin of the 
things themselves, that the argument 
which has been already noticed is suffi- 
cient, the argument that since everything, 
the individual included, arises for us only 
as an element within experience, we can- 



Hegel 207 

not make experience itself belong to that 
which only is a part of it. A knowledge 
of myself can, indeed, arise only within 
experience, but that does not prevent the 
experience from still being mine, individ- 
ually; for what I mean by myself is just 
the whole concrete unity of experience, 
within which the knowledge is an ele- 
ment, a conscious unity which experi- 
ences only itself, but which knows itself 
and a great many other things besides. 
Accordingly there is at the start a pre- 
sumption that the notion will not con- 
tinue to apply to the wider sphere of 
reality, if we keep clear the distinction 
which common sense draws, and do not, 
as Hegel does, allow the two to be 
merged together. 

It must of course be admitted freely 
that there is some sense in which the in- 
dividual is to be regarded as an element 
in the larger life of the world, as having 
its place fixed and its meaning deter- 
mined by the part it plays in the econ- 



208 Hegel 

omy of the universe. But it is not a 
question as to whether this is true in 
some sense, but whether it is true in 
the particular sense which Hegel asserts, 
whether, that is, the individual and God 
have a relation, not of independent per- 
sonalities, but of such mutual implication 
that one is a mere moment in the life of 
the other, not separate from it in any 
degree. Is, in other words, the ultimate 
reality, God, of a nature which is ade- 
quately expressed in the self-evident re- 
ality of Experience, or Consciousness, or 
Life, which thus is made more funda- 
mental than any self which is conscious, 
which experiences and lives } 

If we look to the world on its physical 
side, as it is interpreted by the theory 
of evolution, we do get a suggestion of 
the unity we are in search of. Every 
step in the process of evolution has its 
interpretation by reference to the whole 
line of development; each physical move- 
ment has its vital connection with the 



Hegel 209 

whole world mechanism, and involves 
shiftings of energy throughout the entire 
fabric, which, again, are connected con- 
tinuously with similar transformations in 
the past and future. But such a devel- 
opment is what we call a physical fact, 
and of course we cannot transform it 
without further ceremony into a fact of 
consciousness, unless we are ready to as- 
sert that development of which, through 
knowledge, we are conscious, means pre- 
cisely the same thing as a conscious de- 
velopment, and, therefore, can be used 
interchangeably with it. 

We need, then, not simply the concept 
of a physical development, but of one 
which is conscious of itself and its own 
meaning. But even if we were to take 
the external world as such a conscious 
development, this would not answer the 
problem we are now considering; for while 
the physical activities of our bodies would 
form part of this development, there would 
still remain our conscious lives, those units 



210 Hegel 

of self-conscious experience which we 
call finite selves, and which, as we have 
seen, have enough apparent separateness 
from the world and from one another, 
enough of an existence of their own, to 
make it a very real problem how, in their 
case, the more inclusive unity could still 
be maintained. One way of doing this, 
and perhaps the most obvious one, would 
be, not by denying the fact either of the 
individual consciousness or of the wider 
world consciousness in any way, but only 
by taking the supposed limitation of the 
former as an illusion, and by regarding it 
as forming, when we get back of appear- 
ance to reality, a continuous fabric with 
the rest of existence, an element in the 
whole just as a single sensation is an 
element in the conscious unity of our own 
lives. This is a theory which will need to 
be considered later ; but if we keep to the 
interpretation which has been suggested 
in the present chapter, it is not the answer 
which Hegel himself would make. Hegel 



Hegel 211 

requires something more than that a finite 
self should reflect, in a decidedly inade- 
quate way, the meaning of reality as it 
already exists along with, and more inclu- 
sive than, the self ; he requires a conscious 
unity of growth, wherein every activity 
which, by abstraction, we call a particular 
activity, in reality sums up the whole 
process so far as it has gone as yet, is the 
whole at that particular stage. There is 
no single activity that can be looked at in 
any other way than as a unitary conscious 
whole in a particular expression; it does 
not simply copy a more perfect reality 
which already exists, but is itself a con- 
dition of this more perfect reality, a step 
in the development which constitutes it. 

And if we keep to the facts of what 
everybody calls conscious experience, as 
Hegel is obliged to do, we can see, again, 
that the conception may be made to apply 
to the experience of an individual, but fails 
us just as soon as we take it beyond this 
limited sphere. Let us take as an ex- 



212 Hegel 

ample the active attempt to solve a prob- 
lem in geometry. This is an experience 
which forms a whole, and which, so far as 
its own consciousness is concerned, ex- 
cludes for the time being all the rest of 
the world. It is, however, an experience 
which is not accomplished all at once, 
but which in its accomplishment passes 
through a series of connected stages. 
Now if we take any one particular stage, 
the act, say, of drawing a line, we may 
maintain in an intelligible way that this 
act is the experience taken at a particular 
point. Just at that moment it is the whole 
thing; the past and future exist only as 
summed up in it ; and this is possible be- 
cause, as a stage in the whole, the mean- 
ing of the entire act is expressing itself in 
it. We should not draw this particular 
line except as we were governed by what 
we had already done, and by what we 
were still going to do. 

And this seems to be the only definite 
and verifiable way in which Hegel's re- 



Hegel 213 

quirements are capable of 'being met. But 
if we transfer this to anything else than 
such concrete experiences as solving a 
problem would be, we find that the anal- 
ogy breaks down. Drawing the line is 
literally the whole thing at that particular 
point ; there is more that is past, and more 
that is to follow, but just at this moment 
it exhausts the field. So we may admit, 
too, that the whole experience of solving 
the problem is part of a larger unity which 
extends before and after it, of a larger 
purpose which the solution serves, and 
that at just this point it is the larger pur- 
pose ; and so we may go on till we reach 
the unity of the life experience as a whole. 
But the larger reality of which such a 
unity can be predicated transcends the 
special phase always in the direction of 
the past and future, and never is some- 
thing that is contemporaneous with it, or 
else the latter could not be said literally to 
be reality, but could only be a part of it, 
and the other part would have to be recog- 



214 Hegel 

nized as having* a separate existence with 
reference to it. So that there are only 
two courses for Hegel to take. Either he 
must say that any concrete experience 
that forms a conscious unity, such as the 
experience of solving a problem in geom- 
etry, or of walking, or of eating, does at 
that particular moment exhaust the reality 
of the world, — and then there is nothing 
to choose between him and the subjective 
idealist ; or else he must admit that, along 
at the same time with this particular ex- 
perience, and external to it so far as its 
own consciousness of itself is concerned, 
other reality exists, at least the reality of 
other men's experience, if not the reality 
of the external world. But if at the same 
moment different facts of experience exist 
which are mutuallv unconscious of one 
another, it is no longer possible to see how 
they form a unity such as is expressed by 
calling them moments in a single con- 
scious process; that, again, is a unity 
which will apply to a single stream of 



Hegel 215 

experience like an individual life, where 
each phase, so long as it continues, is 
literally all that exists ; but some other 
conception is required to account for the 
connection of two active experiences which, 
without either recognizing the other, are 
going on at precisely the same time. For 
we are here shut off from a claim which 
another philosopher might perhaps make, 
that implicitly, though not consciously, 
all the rest of reality is involved ; for 
if the unity of conscious experience is 
the definition of reality, except as it 
comes within a conscious unity nothing 
can exist. 

To refer back, then, to the statement 
which was made in starting, Hegel is 
not wrong in making reality consist in 
meaning, but only in interpreting mean- 
ing to the exclusion of that which is 
meant. What constitutes the reality of 
any individual experience is, indeed, its 
meaning, its relation to the whole uni- 
verse of reality of which it is a part. 



216 Hegel 

But this implies not simply the particular 
experience and its own realization of its 
value, but it also implies the existence, 
on its own account, of all that other 
reality without which the meaning would 
disappear; and this side of existence, of 
reality which is known without being act- 
ually present in the experience which 
knows it, Hegel fails to do justice to. As 
soon, then, as this is recognized, we dis- 
cover that, whatever we may say about the 
external world, at least those sets of 
experiences which we call finite selves 
remain, as existences, in a real sense 
distinct, each with its own sensational 
filling, and that they require some other 
connecting bond than the simple concept 
of "experience." In other words, Hegel's 
philosophy is an acute and valuable psy- 
chology of the individual and of society^ 
not a science of the universe. As a 
science of the universe it must maintain, 
on its most favorable showing, that the 
growth in the appreciation of the world 



Hegel 217 

and of life which the human race has 
so far accomplished is God, is reality, 
and the mere statement of this result is 
enough to condemn it. 



AGNOSTICISM AND THE 
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 




AGNOSTICISM AND THE 
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 

jT is not easy to state in a 
summary way the advantages 
which have resulted to philoso- 
phy from Hegel's treatment of its prob- 
lems, but two or three of the most 
important of them may be briefly re- 
capitulated. Hegel was able at once to 
make the meaning of life concrete, with 
a definite value for its own sake, and 
to bring it under the unity of a single 
principle. He made it concrete, because 
he ceased to take abstract thought as 
the means of getting at some ulterior 
reality in a world of abstractions, and 
found its use in the growth of experi- 
ence itself; and, similarly, since the use 



222 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

of knowledge was not to copy a more 
perfect existence simply, but to enrich 
experience, each stage of experience was 
given the manifest value belonging to an 
essential step in the process of growth. 
The same concept of a growing process 
enabled him to reduce the conscious life 
to a unitary principle, by doing away 
with the dead fixedness which had been 
so, common in the notion of reality, and 
by making it, instead, dynamic and active. 
In this way, the distinctions which thought 
introduces into life no longer stood side 
by side as mere variety, each on its 
own basis, with only an external connec- 
tion, but they could now be interpreted 
with reference to the one active process 
of development. And so we are able to 
solve the problem of earlier philosophy, 
and get a unity which shall not be ab- 
stract, apart from variety, but a unity in 
variety, a unity which, as intelligent and 
active purpose, takes up the complexity 
of means which are needed for its ac- 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 223 

complishment as an essential part of it- 
self. And while Hegel's conception, if 
the criticism in the preceding chapter 
is justified, cannot, just as it stands, be 
taken as a philosophy of the universe, 
we yet may hold that its value for such 
a philosophy is very considerable. By 
showing that all the thought categories 
lead up to, and have their explanation 
by reference to, the highest category 
of self-conscious experience, Hegel has 
shown the futility of finding the essence 
of reality in such partial categories as 
matter, or force, or substance ; and we 
can therefore look with some confidence 
on the conscious self as at least the 
type which most adequately represents 
reality, and as pointing the direction in 
which a key to the nature of the uni- 
verse is to be found. 

With Hegel we reach the culmination 
of one line of development from Kant. 
Along with objective idealism, the other 
two types of theory which have played 



224 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

the most important part in the later 
development of philosophy are, on the 
one side, agnosticism, and on the other, 
the various forms of what perhaps may 
be called theistic idealism. Both of these 
owe a great deal to Kant, but particu- 
larly the former, as it was this result 
which Kant himself explicitly adopted. 
The same tendency has been greatly 
strengthened also by recent scientific 
thought. Kant's agnosticism, it will be 
remembered, was based on this, that the 
intellectual forms of abstract thought, 
which hitherto had been supposed to 
give us reality, were, as he discovered, 
only capable of being used if they were 
supplied with material cast in the form 
of space and time; and as these latter 
forms seemed to him to be purely sub- 
jective, it followed that the nature of 
things as they are in themselves is com- 
pletely hidden from us. While dispens- 
ing with much of Kant's machinery, 
modern scientific agnosticism is essen- 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 225 

tially of the same type. It also starts 
from the subjective nature of our sense 
experience. Science shows how sensa- 
tions of color, and sound, and taste, do 
not in reality represent the nature of 
the outside world, but are due to the 
peculiar construction of our sense organs ; 
and yet as sensations appear to be forced 
upon us, it assumes that there is some- 
thing more original than the sensations 
themselves, which by its action on the 
senses gives rise to them. Since, how- 
ever, all our knowledge is cast in a 
sensuous mould, it is necessarily relative 
to our sensuous mechanism, and never 
reveals what the reality is in its own 
existence. 

It is well to notice, however, an impor- 
tant difference in attitude between Kant 
and the modern scientist. Kant was pro- 
foundly interested in the nature of things- 
in-themselves, and it was, indeed, his 
purpose to show that, while we cannot 
prove the spiritual character of this ulti- 



226 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

mate reality, and its consonancy with 
man's highest interests, yet it is equally 
impossible for the sceptic to disprove it; 
and so there is no necessary contradiction 
in accepting the existence of God, free- 
dom, and immortality, in case there are 
reasons for doing this other than intel- 
lectual. These reasons Kant himself found 
in the moral life. The scientific agnostic, 
on the other hand, is commonly very well 
content to leave questions about the ulti- 
mate nature of reality unanswered. It 
seems to him that the phenomenal world 
is all that is of any interest to us. So long 
as we can detect the laws of phenomena, 
and use them practically in furthering the 
interests of man in the world, what reason 
is there, he will ask, that we should worry 
ourselves over what lies back of phenom- 
ena, and never enters into human life at 
all .? Before we look at the intellectual 
grounds for agnosticism, let us consider 
this emotional attitude which it involves. 
And a distinction may be drawn 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 227 

here between agnosticism, and scepti- 
cism. Scepticism, in its pure form, is 
simply a criticism of existing theories, and 
a demand to know their basis and crite- 
rion ; it is not a positive theory itself. 
Agnosticism goes beyond this in saying 
that reality is of a special kind, a kind 
which is unknowable, and which at least, 
then, is different from anything that sense 
experience can give us. But agnosticism 
and scepticism may both agree in question- 
ing the value of any other knowledge than 
that practical and everyday knowledge 
which is sufficient to satisfy our material 
needs. 

To this common objection to the claims 
of philosophy, the objection that, if we 
can know enough to govern our actions in 
the world, and make such use of natural 
forces as is needed to assist us in our pur- 
poses, we have everything that can be of 
any value to us, there are two things to 
be said. In the first place, such know^- 
ledge hardly guarantees all that we require 



228 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

even for this purely practical need. It is, 
and must be, just a rule of thumb know- 
ledge, which is based upon no insight into 
the real nature of the phenomena with 
which we have to do ; and it therefore 
leaves us, necessarily and forever, in the 
position of mere empiricists, with no ra- 
tional foundation for believing that our 
practical empire over nature is anything 
but accidental, and so liable to be over- 
turned at any moment. But apart from 
this, the assertion is not true that we can 
be content merely with what insures us a 
practical control over natural forces, as if 
every one would be quite happy if he had 
enough to eat and wear. The scientific 
spirit is itself much more than this. The 
scientist does not study electricity in order 
directly to apply it to telegraphs and elec- 
tric motors, but he is interested in it on its 
own account, as showing the innermost 
construction of the world; and if he did 
not feel that he was getting at reality 
thereby, his work would lose half its zest 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 229 

for him. And just this interest which is 
the life of science, the interest in know- 
ing what things really are, is of itself an 
answer to the claim that it does not matter 
to us whether we get at the reality beyond 
phenomena or not. If there is a more ulti- 
mate reality than that of the phenomena 
with which science deals, it is useless to 
tell us that our interest should stop with 
the surface appearance, and refuse to pen- 
etrate beneath it ; that is what it never will 
consent to do. And this desire to know 
what things really are, as opposed to what 
they seem to be, is no mere idle curiosity ; 
it belongs with our desire to grasp the 
meaning of life itself. It cannot be a mat- 
ter of unconcern whether reality, in its 
final statement, is akin to us, something 
which justifies and backs up those inter- 
ests which we recognize as highest in 
human life, or whether the latter are but 
an unessential incident upon the surface 
of a universe which, at its heart, is quite 
indifferent to them. While there remains 



230 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

so large a part of our experience as that 
which is constituted by our relations to the 
outer world, which refuses to take its place 
within the ideal values of life, and remains 
an alien and contingent element, the har- 
mony which we seek in life is put beyond 
our reach. 

A sbmewhat similar reply can be made 
to those who would have us find in human- 
itarian interests, in the relationships which 
constitute human society, a final and satis- 
factory account of all we can say about 
reality, which stands in no need of any 
more ultimate knowledge to give it sanc- 
tion. It may very well be true that no 
values exist apart from the social whole, 
and that this supplies us with the best key 
we can get to the inner meaning of the 
world. But still it is impossible to ignore 
the fact that human life is but an infinitely 
small part of that universe in which it is 
placed, and that we cannot, with the 
agnostic, set aside as unimportant the 
relations which human life bears to reality 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 23 1 

as a whole, without taking the foundation 
out from under the validity of social inter- 
ests themselves. If humanity has no jus- 
tification in the ultimate constitution of 
things, it is impossible that it should make 
any permanent demand upon our loyalty 
and reverence. The agnostic can exalt 
humanity, only because, in spite of his 
creed, he feels that here he has got into 
some true contact with the real ; and if he 
does not feel this, he will inevitably pass 
over into cynicism, or at best into a mood 
of good-natured toleration. 

But whether we desire to know the 
nature of reality or not, of course we 
might just as well give the whole thing up 
first as last, if it is true, as the agnostic 
claims, that such knowledge is denied us ; 
and this leads to the second point, the crit- 
icism of agnosticism on the intellectual 
side, as a philosophical theory for which 
definite arguments are adduced. And in 
a negative way, the most obvious reason 
for refusing assent to the claims which the 



232 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

agnostic makes is this, that if it really were 
true that knowledge is confined simply to 
phenomena, then by no possibility could 
we ever be aware of it. There is a con- 
tradiction in saying that things-in-them- 
selves exist, but that we cannot know 
them; if we know that they exist, then 
they cannot be unknowable, for at least 
their existence is known, and, it may be 
added, their positive causal relation to 
phenomena also. And if we have this 
very definite and important knowledge, by 
what right are we to be compelled to stop 
here } In principle there is no difference 
between this knowledge and any further 
knowledge we may wish to claim ; an 
argument to prove we cannot know what 
things are, tells equally against the know- 
ledge that they are. It has been seen al- 
ready, in speaking of Kant, that it is the 
principle of causation upon which it is 
relied to prove that things-in-themselves 
exist, and that if our knowledge is of a 
truth confined within the realm of phenom- 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 233 

ena, this principle will apply only to phe- 
nomenal existence, and will not take us a 
step beyond. So that if it were actually 
true that our knowledge is simply of phe- 
nomena, we should indeed, as a matter of 
fact, be confined within a certain field, but 
then, too, we should be perfectly satisfied 
with this, and should never suspect that 
there was anything beyond it. In know- 
ing the limits, we have already implicitly 
passed beyond them. 

What, then, is the flaw in the argu- 
ments by means of which the agnostic 
attempts to prove that our knowledge 
of reality must be a knowledge of ap- 
pearance only, and never of things in 
their own proper nature "i In order to 
answer the question, it will be necessary 
to scrutinize more carefully what is im- 
plied in the possibility of any knowledge 
at all. We have seen that there are 
two questions which are concerned here : 
the nature of knowledge as a process 
of knowing, an immediate experience, 



234 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

and the nature of the external reference 
which knowledge involves. This latter 
problem idealism practically ignores. 
Subjective idealism assumes that states 
of consciousness, sensations, tell us about 
themselves, but not about anything be- 
sides ; that we have the sensation as 
an assured fact, but anything beyond 
this only as an inference. Hegelianism 
does not confine knowledge to sensations, 
indeed, for it recognizes that our experi- 
ence is not of sensations merely, but of 
objective things ; but still it holds that the 
object exists only for experience, which, 
as has been seen, must logically mean 
either the individual, or, at best, the race 
experience, and that it stands for no 
separate abiding reality beyond, and ex- 
isting simultaneously with, the experience 
which knows it. 

The earlier attempts to solve this 
second aspect of the problem of know- 
ledge were based on very crude material 
analogies, and can easily be recognized 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 23 5 

now as having no real explanatory value. 
The mind was looked on as a sort of 
blank paper, or wax tablet, and then 
external things somehow came in and 
impressed a copy of themselves upon it. 
This fancy, besides depending on an un- 
critical analogy, also carried the impli- 
cation with it that the object was like 
the copy which it made in conscious- 
ness ; and as the scientific conception of 
the world gained ground, and the purely 
subjective nature of sensation seemed to 
be established, it naturally would fall 
away. But now if we are left with 
sensations as the only facts immediately 
given, and sensations which are wholly 
unlike the reality which causes them, 
how are we to know there is such a 
reality at all } The word " cause " sug- 
gests the answer which has most com- 
monly been made; we know reality 
beyond our own consciousness by an act 
of thought, as the result of a process of 
reasoning based on the notion of causa- 



236 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

tion. The rationalist could do this with 
a good conscience, for he had the neces- 
sary tools at hand, in the shape of self- 
evident truths ; but the sensationalist 
came back just as truly to the same 
idea. He had his sensations, and he 
wished to get beyond them ; and the 
only way was by assuming that the sen- 
sations did not furnish a sufficient reason 
for their own existence, and so must 
have a cause. In so far, then, as the 
question was consciously put at all, our 
knowledge of the outer world was re- 
garded as an inference, depending on 
an act of abstract thinking, with the 
notion of causation as its basis. 

Now this whole assumption, that it 
is only sensations that are known im- 
mediately, and that our knowledge of 
external objects is an indirect inference, 
may be called in question. Is it true 
that sensations are known any more 
directly than objects are } So much of 
the assertion is of course true, that we 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 23 7 

cannot experience anything which is not 
our experience, but the confusion comes 
in confounding experiencing with know- 
ing. Let us distinguish, then, between 
an immediate awareness of, and a medi- 
ate knowledge about. And there has 
already been occasion to notice, in the 
chapter on sensationalism, that the former 
by itself is insufficient to carry us a step. 
An experience, as merely conscious of 
itself in an immediate way, tells us noth- 
ing whatever about anything else, and 
when it ceases to be directly experienced 
it is gone forever, and is incapable of 
leaving a trace behind. In order to ex- 
amine a conscious state, and know it as 
such, we have to depend upon memory, 
and then it is not the conscious state 
which is known that is immediately ex- 
perienced, but the state of knowing it; 
a thing which is known is never as such 
a direct matter of experience. Since, 
then, it is a question, for philosophy at 
least, not of merely experiencing a sen- 



238 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

sation, but of knowing it as a sensation, 
a state of consciousness is not given to 
us, for knowledge, as the immediate, in- 
dubitable fact which it has been claimed 
to be, but it raises just the same ques- 
tions that an external object raises. 

Just as it is not true that we immedi- 
ately experience states of consciousness 
as subjective, so it is not true, either, 
that, in point of fact, we get at the outer 
world by an indirect inference. Sensa- 
tionalism supposes that first there comes 
the consciousness of a sensation, and 
then, by a complicated process of reason- 
ing, this is taken to involve in some way 
a reality distinct from it. No one who 
will examine what actually happens when 
he looks at an object can fail to see 
how purely mythological this description 
is; he certainly will find that he has no 
consciousness of any inference, and no 
consciousness, even, that there are two 
things involved, a sensation and an object, 
but the seeing of the object will appear 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 239 

to him to be a purely immediate and 
unitary act. Before we ask, however, 
what really is involved in the possibility 
of an act of knowledge, let us consider 
first the nature of a conscious experi- 
ence of any kind. 

If we examine any conscious experi- 
ence which is accessible to us, we shall 
find that any element in it which we 
can pin down and fix, as in some sort 
an existence, can be described in terms 
of sensation, including under this term 
those so-called revived sensations which 
are called images. From one point of 
view, then, our conscious life may be 
reduced to a chain of such sensational 
facts, and it is this which is the justifi- 
cation of what the sensationalist con- 
tends for. The sensationalist is wrong, 
however, in saying that this chain of 
sensations is the original stuff from 
which all the conscious Ufe is second- 
arily derived. We have already seen 
that what we have originally is not a 



240 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

lot of sensations, but a whole of experi- 
ence, out of which the sensations are 
differentiated; and that the attempt to 
build up everything by merely adding 
sensations together has been a failure. 
It is no adequate description of the facts 
to speak of life as made up of a pas- 
sive flow of conscious states; it clearly is 
far more than this, however the *' more " 
may be described. My experience in 
eating an apple is not a sensation of 
sight, plus a sensation of touch, plus a 
sensation of taste, but it is just what it 
purports to be — the experience of eating 
an apple. What is it, then, that the 
sensationalist leaves out of his account.-* 

If we try to supply the missing ele- 
ment, we shall find that it is most ade- 
quately characterized as the element of 
activity. By conscious activity is meant 
simply this : a process which is governed 
all along by some end or purpose, which 
is present at each stage, selecting be- 
tween possible alternatives, and shaping 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 241 

the course in which consciousness shall 
flow ; so that at the end there is the 
recognition of having accomplished some- 
thing, which something is the reason and 
justification of all that had gone before. 
There is not simply a string of discon- 
nected existences, but the whole is bound 
together into a unity by this teleological 
reference. The end is not a fact which 
is added to the parts, but it is accom- 
plished in them ; each element that we 
can distinguish has its particular place 
with reference to the end in view, and 
only with reference to this does it pos- 
sess meaning. Purpose, conscious or 
unconscious, intended or actual, is what 
characterizes normal experience, and gives 
it all the worth that it possesses. We 
do not have to think, therefore, of the 
spiritual element in experience as some- 
thing which is superadded to the sensa- 
tional life, in a higher realm of being, as 
Plato conceived of it, but as the inner 
spirit which presides over and animates 



242 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

all experience. All experience alike is 
sensational, but all alike is also more 
than this ; it is a conscious act, wherein 
the elements of sensation and of image 
are disposed and used in relation to a 
unifying end. Sensation or image must 
be present to give content and reality to 
life, otherwise it would lack substance 
and body, would be moving in the 
vacuum of pure abstraction ; but it is 
there not as bare fact, mere sensation, but 
as an element in an activity which uses 
it for its own ends, an activity in which 
every part fits into and aims towards 
the accomplishment of a purpose, which 
expresses itself in the entire process, and 
governs it at every stage. This activity 
cannot be found, of course, in any special 
element, because it is present everywhere; 
we cannot lay our finger on it as a par- 
ticular bit of existence, as we can on a 
sensation, for that would be to arrest it, 
and it could not be arrested without being 
by that very fact destroyed. 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 243 

By drawing this distinction, then, be- 
tween the sensational content in experi- 
ence, and the use to which this is put, 
we may perhaps be better able to under- 
stand what is involved in an act of know- 
ledge. That the distinction in general is 
a valid one is shown most clearly by the 
modern psychology of the concept. A 
consistent sensationalistic philosophy at- 
tempts to do away with the concept, or 
abstract idea, m toto. What is meant, 
asked Berkeley, by the idea of a table 
which is no particular table, has no par- 
ticular size, or shape, or color, but only 
such qualities in general ? When I look 
into my mind I find nothing of this sort, 
but always a particular image, confused, 
perhaps, and indistinct, but still different 
from any other image; or else I find just 
a name, a word. And modern psychol- 
ogy finds no fault with this so far as it 
goes ; the image always is a particular 
image, but the image is not the abstract 
idea. This latter is involved rather in 



244 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

the use to which we put the image ; we 
use the image to mean or stand for any 
or every one of a number of actual tables, 
and it is in this conscious meaning which 
we have that the essence of the concept 
consists. We shall have, then, an expla- 
nation of the possibility of knowledge 
which apparently does not distort the 
facts, if we suppose that, as the particu- 
lar image is lost sight of in its concept- 
ual use, so in a somewhat similar way a 
sensational content in experience may 
come to us without claiming any inter- 
est whatever on its own account, as an 
immediate experience, but with a claim 
to represent directly another reality be- 
yond itself. Let us examine this first in 
a case where the knowledge is of some- 
thing in our own experience. 

If we take an instance of remember- 
ing our former perception of an object, 
psychology will show that there is pres- 
ent, in the act of remembering, an image, 
in some shape or other, that represents 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 245 

this previous experience. This image 
either is a fainter copy of the actual sen- 
sation we had in looking at the object, 
or else it stands indirectly for such a 
copy by association, and would ultimately 
issue in it. But while I am in the act 
of remembering, I am not conscious of 
this image as an image, a present expe- 
rience, though of course I am actually 
passing through a present experience of 
which the image is a part ; but the image 
stands for another experience in the past, 
with which alone my thought is now oc- 
cupied. So that the image has appar- 
ently the power, not indirectly and as a 
matter of inference, but immediately and 
originally, of meaning something which 
existed in the past, but does not now 
exist, and which, therefore, lies beyond 
the experience which knows it. And this 
is all that knowledge means in any case ; 
the only difference, when we come to 
external perception, lies in this, that here 
the reality which the sensational content 



246 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

stands for, means, is a reality which never 
formed, as the perception of the object 
did, a section in that continuous stream 
of experience which we call ours. All 
we have to suppose is that a particular 
fact of sensation in our own experience 
copies, or sufficiently resembles, a similar 
content in a reality beyond our experi- 
ence ; and that this sensation calls no 
attention to its own existence, but comes 
originally with a claim that it means, 
refers to, the reality beyond, which we 
thus are able to know, without its ever 
coming, as an existence, within our con- 
scious life. Consequently, we do not need 
to deny the apparent testimony of expe- 
rience, that the perception of an object 
is an immediate and unitary act. It is 
quite true that we are not conscious of 
the sensation, and of the object to which 
it refers, in the same act ; when the sen- 
sation means an external object, it loses 
itself in this meaning, and to know it as 
a sensation requires a second experience, 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 247 

distinct from the perception of the ob- 
ject. So, also, the object is perceived 
without any process of inference being 
interposed. The fact of claiming to tell 
us about something beyond itself is not 
a fact which we can explain or deduce, 
but it is an ultimate datum. We cannot 
prove, either, that the claim is a valid 
one, in any absolute sense of the term 
"proof"; for since knowledge is the only 
possible way we have of reaching a real- 
ity that lies beyond our own immediate 
experience, it is out of the question for 
us to think of getting such reality, by 
any other means, within our experience 
bodily, for the sake of testing it; those 
practical tests which ordinarily are suffi- 
cient for us we cannot use, because these 
already presuppose what we want to 
prove. But this result is not scepticism. 
It is true, we are compelled to take the 
claim of knowledge in a sense on faith, 
but it is not a groundless faith, for prac- 
tically we must admit the claim in order 



248 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

to so much as doubt it. Doubt must af- 
fect the claim of memory to reproduce 
the past, just as really as it does the 
claim of sense perception to reproduce 
the outer world; and unless we grant 
what memory calls for, we must give up 
all attempts to reason, and live forever 
in the bare sensation of the moment. 
Unless we admit the fact of knowledge 
in the case of memory, our whole world 
goes to pieces; and if we do admit it, 
then we have no right to deny the pre- 
cisely similar claim of sense perception, 
without a very positive reason for our 
denial. 

If we look at the conclusion which 
has just been stated, we shall see that 
it has a further implication which is of 
very great importance. Such a resem- 
blance as is called for, between our ex- 
perience and reality, is only possible 
under one condition. We can know an 
experience of our own for the reason 
that it is a conscious experience, similar 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 249 

in so far to the second experience which 
knows it. So, also, the process which 
we have supposed takes place in per- 
ception will not be possible, unless the 
object, the external thing, is also essen- 
tially of the nature of consciousness, 
similar in kind to the experience by 
which it is known. But while this is 
a very important consideration in its 
place, there is no need just here to 
dwell upon it. The arguments of agnos- 
ticism are based upon the process in- 
volved in knowing, the mechanism of the 
act, and it is on this ground that its ob- 
jections must be met. And we are now 
perhaps in a condition to point out where 
the agnostic's reasoning fails to be con- 
clusive. If we look again at the argu- 
ment of Kant, we see that it is based 
upon the supposition that there are two 
distinct sources in knowledge, sense and 
understanding, which must cooperate be- 
fore knowledge takes place ; and that 
therefore understanding by itself does 



250 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

not take us into the noumenal world. 
And because the abstract understanding 
by itself tells us nothing of reality, there- 
fore there is no possible way in which 
such knowledge can be got. While, 
that is, Kant succeeds in showing that 
the rationalist's attempt to get reality 
out of mere abstract thought is a failure, 
he still retains the rationalistic assump- 
tion, that if we could get reality, abstract 
thought of some sort after all would be 
the only way; and so he imagines a 
thought which should be immediate, and 
not require that material be given it to 
work upon. Now in this position of 
Kant's there are two separate things 
which need to be distinguished. Kant, 
to repeat, had been accustomed to re- 
gard a process of abstract thinking as 
the only path by which we can arrive 
at a knowledge of noumenal reality, and 
since, as he pointed out, such thought, 
for us, always implies sensation, we can- 
not try to make thought work by itself 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 251 

and still expect to get valid results. But 
now this argument, which concerns the 
method of reaching reality, carries also, 
as Kant uses it, an assumption with it 
as to the nature of the reality about 
which we are trying to obtain a know- 
ledge, and this assumption is, that in 
ultimate reality the sense element must 
of necessity be lacking. Not only does 
Kant hold that thought is unable to lead 
us to reality, but the ultimate reason for 
this failure depends, for him, upon the 
supposed impossibility that the sense ex- 
perience to which thought contributes an 
element should in any way resemble the 
real. Suppose we admit, with Kant, 
that thought by itself is insufficient, but 
maintain, as the whole spirit of his argu- 
ment requires, that, when we try to take 
it by itself, thought is purely an abstrac- 
tion, and that the only reality is the 
concrete experience, within which sense 
data and thought are mutually involved 
phases; why might not this concrete 



252 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

experience truly represent the nature of 
ultimate reality, even though that which 
is only an abstracted element from expe- 
rience failed to do so ? Such a question, 
we see, gets no answer from Kant's direct 
argument, which was to the effect that 
human experience fails of being a true 
key to the nature of reality, because it is 
due to the necessary union of thought 
with sense; the question now is, why this 
very union may not be a type of noumenal 
existence, why the real world may not 
correspond to that whole concrete expe- 
rience which it takes both sense and 
thought to constitute. And Kant answers 
this question, not by an argument, but by 
an assumption — the assumption that our 
experience, which is cast in the form of 
space and time, must -obviously be purely 
subjective, subjective in the sense that it 
must be utterly unlike that which it pro- 
fesses to represent. But this is after all 
not obvious; it requires to be proved. If, 
indeed, it were meant simply to deny that 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 253 

space and time are things by themselves, 
within which the absolute reality exists, as 
our bodies exist in space and are limited 
by it, we might consider that Kant has 
sufficiently proved his point. But the real 
thing that he would need to deny is this, 
that noumenal reality may conceivably 
be a self-conscious experience similar to 
the experience which constitutes our own 
lives, and that between the elements of 
this experience there may be certain real 
relations which correspond to spatial and 
temporal relations ; and this is not a con- 
ception which is on the face of it impos- 
sible, though no doubt it leaves genuine 
metaphysical difficulties still to be solved. 
But they are difficulties to which, again, 
our experience affords at least a clew. If 
I take my own experience, it is, as Kant 
himself pointed out, even as a temporal 
experience, in some sense also out of and 
above time, since the conscious unity 
which is present through it all, and with- 
out which it could not exist, is no mem- 



254 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

ber of the temporal series, but something 
which makes the very conception of time 
possible. And if my self can express it- 
self in what from another point of view 
appears as an experience in time, without 
becoming a part of this temporal series, 
or being limited by it, we cannot deny the 
same possibility to the Absolute. It is, 
therefore, only an assumption on Kant's 
part, which he really does not undertake 
to prove, that ultimate reality must of 
necessity be quite unlike what we know 
as human life. And if this is granted, it 
has already been seen how it is possible 
to obviate the force of his more explicit 
argument. Experience, for us, is not a 
thing made up of two distinct parts, a set 
of abstract forms, and a formless material 
given to them to work upon. If, as Kant 
declared, experience is impossible without 
both thought and sense, then by them- 
selves thought and sense are mere ab- 
stractions, and never existed, or could 
exist, apart. The reality is the concrete 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 255 

sensuous experience, which, as it is a con- 
scious unity, must from the start be bound 
together by what we afterwards recognize 
as thought relations, and not be made up 
simply of a lot of sensations ; and the 
distinction between sense and thought, 
therefore, as an explicit distinction in ex- 
perience, is not a metaphysical but a 
psychological one, and must be explained 
by showing what part the given element 
and the conceptual element play in the 
one experience of which they are — not 
component factors, but related phases. 
And we no longer have any need to hold 
that it is the function of the thought 
element, working by itself, to reveal to us 
the existence of a reality beyond our ex- 
perience, because we have already dis- 
covered that this knowledge, as a matter 
of fact, comes to us in a much more direct 
way. We may still find ourselves able to 
retain those things-in-themselves which 
proved so unmanageable for Kant, by 
dropping the notion altogether that their 



256 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

existence has to be established for us by 
a process of thought, and by recognizing 
that the knowledge of them is an original 
datum, which is given in the immediate 
claim on the part of certain concrete sec- 
tions of our experience to stand for reali- 
ties other than themselves, and which is 
already presupposed in every act of think- 
ing. In an act of thought or judgment, 
such as "This rose is red," we have the 
subject " this rose," which already, even 
before the judgment is passed, carries with 
it the reference to external reality. "This 
rose" represents a certain part of my ex- 
perience, constituted, for me, by previous 
acts of judgment, and so involving both 
the elements of thought and sense, which 
is used to stand for a reality, the actual 
rose; and when the judgment is com- 
pleted, there is still this same external 
reference, only enlarged now from " rose " 
to "red rose." In addition, therefore, to 
the act of thinking, and presupposed by 
it both at the beginning and the end, not 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 257 

in any sense a mere result from it, is this 
fact of meaning something which is not 
present in the experience itself, and which 
is not abstract like the thought element, 
but concrete, as the whole experience is ; 
and it is upon this that the possibility of 
knowledge is based. 

The criticism of scientific agnosticism 
must take a somewhat different line. 
Again we may ask, without trying for 
the moment to establish any positive 
theory, what impossibility there is in the 
way of supposing that ultimate reality 
is of a nature which can be approxi- 
mately represented in terms of sensuous 
experience, in case we find any reasons 
for such a belief. The scientific agnos- 
tic cannot answer, as he might well be 
inclined to do, that sensuous experience 
is no true picture of the real world, for 
the reason that this world, as science 
conceives of it, in terms of molecules 
in motion, is altogether different from 
sensations ; we cannot say that we know 



258 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

the world is of a particular molecular 
construction, without giving up the con- 
tention that it is unknowable. And yet 
many of the arguments on which the 
agnostic relies do, in reality, come pre- 
cisely to this. We are in general so 
ready to admit that our knowledge fails 
of attaining to the real, because we have 
so much practical experience of the un- 
certainty which is apt to attend it, of the 
fluctuations which sense perception un- 
dergoes, and the comparatively slight 
changes in the physical world which are 
sufficient to alter the entire complexion 
of our conscious life. But such an argu- 
ment all the time presupposes that we 
know the inadequacy of passing phases 
of experience, only because we can set 
over against them a truer reality to com- 
pare them with, and a reality which, there- 
fore, we know to be adequate. We say 
that our sensations fail to give us a true 
account of the world, because we have in 
mind that real and objective order which 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 259 

furnishes a standard which our sensations 
do not succeed in meeting. But apart 
from this, there is also a rather vaguely 
defined notion, on which the agnostic 
relies, that consciousness is itself a sort 
of product, in which the factors that rep- 
resent reality in its more original form 
are inseparably blended ; and that there- 
fore we can only know this product, and 
not the factors in their separate and more 
real existence. This is sometimes con- 
fusedly put in the form of a statement 
that consciousness involves both a sub- 
ject that knows, and an object that is 
known, and that the object by itself, ac- 
cordingly, cannot be the same as it is 
when thus brought into relation with a 
subject, since the relation changes it. But 
when we ask exactly what this statement 
means, we shall find that it can be reduced 
to the very commonplace admission that, 
if I am going to know anything, it has 
got to be known by me, and so by a sub- 
ject ; and such a ''relation" tells abso- 



260 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

lutely nothing about the knowability of 
objects, unless it is based on the original 
assumption, which is a pure assumption, 
that the nature of objects is utterly unlike 
conscious experience, and therefore cannot 
be reproduced in terms of consciousness 
without being falsified. It is true that 
the argument is valid so long as we have 
in mind by an object a so-called material 
thing, whose sole characteristic is that it 
is not consciousness; but then we have 
an argument against materialism, and not 
against the possibility of knowledge in 
general. 

There is, however, another fact which 
perhaps more often the scientist has in 
mind in speaking of the relativity of 
knowledge, and that is the dependence 
of consciousness upon the sense organs. 
Consciousness, it is said, cannot tell us 
about the real world, because it is a sec- 
ondary product, which results only on 
the occasion of a reaction between the 
object and the bodily structure. Here, 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 261 

again, we imply, as was said before, a 
degree of knowledge about the physical 
object, and the physiological processes, 
which is fatal to agnosticism ; but we may 
pass this by, and consider simply the 
argument that is involved in the word 
** product." The force of the argument 
seems to depend on either one of two 
things. On the one hand, the thought 
may be that two factors, which have a 
separate existence, combine to form a 
product distinct in nature from them- 
selves, in which, however, they lose them- 
selves completely, as oxygen and hydrogen 
may be supposed to disappear in order to 
give place to water. But in that case, 
since it only is the product which we, as 
conscious beings, can have to base our 
knowledge on, there would be no reason 
for our thinking that there were such 
things as separate factors at all. If water 
could be imagined conscious, it could never 
suspect the existence of oxygen and hy- 
drogen, because for the wholly different 



262 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

properties of oxygen and hydrogen to 
exist, water would have to disappear. In 
reality, however, this cannot be what the 
scientific agnostic means, for he supposes 
that the factors of which he speaks do 
not disappear in the conscious product, 
but that this product is something addi- 
tional, which exists alongside and beyond 
them. Therefore his argument would 
seem to turn rather on this idea, that the 
action of an object in cooperation with 
the physiological processes of the organ- 
ism cannot, just for the reason that there 
is this cooperation, produce a conscious 
product which shall represent the object 
by itself. But, after all, what is the basis 
of this supposed impossibility .'' Is not 
the fact that such a mutual interaction in 
the physical world must produce a physi- 
cal result unlike either of the cooperating 
causes, the sole fact that the agnostic can 
bring forward to substantiate his conten- 
tion .? Now in the scientific explanation 
of sensation we find certain vibrations 



Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 263 

outside the body, and then a series of 
molecular changes in the brain which 
these give rise to; and the latter do dif- 
fer from the former because they have 
first been mediated by the peculiar con- 
struction of the sense organs. But taken 
strictly, this is only a doctrine of brain 
movements, and not of conscious facts 
at all, and unless we identify sensations 
with nervous changes in the brain, it tells 
us nothing of the former. But the con- 
scious fact is not the brain motion, and 
does not resemble it in the slightest; 
since, therefore, it lies outside the realm 
of facts to which our scientific statements 
apply, we have absolutely no a priori 
reason for saying that because, in the 
physical world, the brain movement can- 
not resemble that which makes up only 
a part of the conditions that are necessary 
to produce it, therefore the non-physical 
fact of consciousness may not represent the 
reality which, indeed, is what ultimately 
gives rise to it, but which is its cause in 



264 Agnosticism, Theory of Knowledge 

quite another sense from that in which 
one physical process is the cause of 
another. We cannot make such a state- 
ment, that is, unless we assume to start 
with that reality is unrepresentable in 
consciousness, or unless, again, we go back 
to the position that sensational experience 
is untrue, because it is different from that 
truer reality of molecules in motion, which 
science tells us of : and then we have 
ceased to be agnostics. 



THEISTIC IDEALISM 




THEISTIC IDEALISM 

E have traced in the preceding 
chapters the attempts on the 
part of philosophy to discover 
some conception which should be ade- 
quate to the nature of reality as a whole. 
The first tendency, we found, was to 
make the conception a very abstract one ; 
the concrete facts of experience were set 
aside in order to get at some peculiarly 
real essence of reality behind them. But 
this attempt had to pay the penalty of 
failing to explain the things which thus 
had been ignored, and which yet were 
the very things to explain which philoso- 
phy had been called into existence. A 
more definite conception, therefore, had 
267 



268 Theistic Idealism 

to be attained, and it soon became evi- 
dent that the only category which stood 
any chance of meeting the requirements, 
was the category of conscious hfe. 
Berkeley and Hegel alike were agreed 
in this, that the effort to get a notion of 
what anything can be outside of con- 
sciousness is doomed to failure in ad- 
vance. Conscious experience is the only 
reality we know, or possibly can know, 
and unless it represents reality truly, we 
must confess that we have no idea at 
all of what ultimate reality is like. Of 
course this last alternative always remains 
open; perhaps we do not know what ulti- 
mate reality is like : but if this be true, 
it is not a conclusion which we can prove 
dogmatically, but only remains as a pos- 
sible alternative, after our failure to ar- 
rive at any more positive result. As a 
reasoned demonstration of the impossi- 
bility of knowledge, agnosticism cannot 
maintain itself; at best it is only a con- 
fession of our intellectual defeat. It al- 



Theistic Idealism 269 

ways leaves the door open, therefore, for 
a new attempt, and if we still have con- 
fidence to make the trial, then, once more, 
it is the verdict of philosophy that in 
idealism of some sort and fashion, and 
in idealism alone, is there any hope of 
finding a solution whose failure is not 
a foregone conclusion. In the present 
chapter, then, the effort will be made to 
arrive at some positive theory, which shall 
avoid the difficulties which the previous 
arguments have made us familiar with ; 
while there will also be occasion to dif- 
ferentiate this from certain other types 
of theory, which likewise may be termed 
idealistic. 

The essential feature of an idealistic 
philosophy consists in this, that the ulti- 
mate reality which constitutes the uni- 
verse is conceived after the analogy, at 
least, of a conscious life. There are, of 
course, difficulties which such a theory 
has to meet, and these may be considered 
in connection with two main problems : 



270 Theistic Idealism 

the relation in which this conscious real- 
ity stands to the material world, and the 
relation which it bears to ourselves as 
conscious beings. 

In examining into the nature of know- 
ledge, we have already been led to a 
definite theory about what we know as 
material existence. Our common-sense 
belief is, without doubt, that the things 
which we perceive in the external world 
exist quite independent of our conscious- 
ness, and exist, too, in very much the 
way they are perceived. Berkeley's no- 
tion that we can reduce the world to 
mere sensations of our own is altogether 
foreign to our natural thought. Yet, on 
the other hand, we found it quite impos- 
sible to give to objects an existence by 
themselves, apart from consciousness, and 
still retain the slightest comprehension of 
what they can be like. But why should 
we not cease trying to think of objects 
as separate realities } why should their 
existence not be an existence within con- 



Theistic Idealism 27 i 

sciousness, where alone they are conceiv- 
able, but in a consciousness more ultimate 
than ours, a world consciousness ? In 
this way we could maintain at once their 
separate reality and their knowableness. 
Let us recall again the previous treat- 
ment of the problem of knowledge. We 
found that the condition which seems to 
be demanded by the fact of knowledge 
is this, that a sensational element in our 
experience should have the power to 
stand for something similar to it in real- 
ity at large. We cannot give up know- 
ledge without divorcing our philosophical 
theories from all those practical beliefs 
which are essential to our active life ; if, 
then, we are to justify it, we must sup- 
pose that ultimate existence is of a nat- 
ure which resembles, in some degree, our 
own conscious life, and that what we 
call objects, therefore, are, when looked 
at truly, no more than elements in this 
absolute consciousness. The world is not, 
as Berkeley supposed, unreal, and reduci- 



272 Theistic Idealism 

ble to our own sensations; these sensa- 
tions really stand, as they claim to do, 
for a reality beyond, and science, there- 
fore, has its justification. But neither is 
the world an incomprehensible world of 
matter divorced from spirit ; it exists 
only as it forms the framework, as it 
were, of God's conscious life, and so it 
has no need to be distinguished from 
God, or related to him, as if it were 
somehow a separate thing. 

Understood in this way, we have an 
answer to those problems which we were 
unable to solve in the earlier chapters. 
How are we to get a unity into the world 
which shall be more than an abstract 
unity, and which shall take up the differ- 
ences as an essential element within it- 
self .? Not by looking behind things for 
an underlying, static substance, but by 
taking the whole dynamic process which 
it requires just this manifold of different 
elements to constitute, and which, again, 
we can understand as a unity only by 



Theistic Idealism 273 

looking to our own active and purposive 
lives. The world can be a unity only if 
it is, like human life, a unity of con- 
scious end. It is this conception of an 
end, which rules in the complexity of 
the conscious life, needing the manifold 
of elements in order to express itself, 
and yet binding them all together into 
what we feel directly as a whole, with- 
out which the parts would have no ex- 
istence, which alone shows how it is 
conceivable that things should be brought 
into connection, without at the same time 
losing their distinction. The unity of 
the world cannot be understood except 
as the unity of purpose, which is carried 
out, not in spite of, but by means of 
differences; and such a purpose has no 
existence outside of conscious life. 

So, too, if we wish to understand more 
in detail how a so-called individual object 
is related to this comprehensive experi- 
ence, we have, again, to consider what 
an object is to us. Let us take any ob- 



274 Theistic Idealism 

ject which enters into human activities, 
the brush, say, which the artist uses in 
his work. There are certain sensations 
which the brush gives rise to, but we do 
not consider that the essence of the 
brush consists in these ; we define the 
object rather by the use to which it is 
put. The sensations, it is true, are pres- 
ent in some degree even when the artist 
is actively at work with his painting, they 
form part of that sensational content 
which is needed to make the experience 
concrete and actual; but what we really 
mean by the brush is defined by the 
purpose which it serves. Even when we 
think of it as a perfectly dead and un- 
changing "thing," this fixed content that 
we have in mind in reality refers back all 
the while to the activities where the 
brush comes into play. So, too, the 
"real" existence of any external object, 
as a tree for instance, we may conceive 
to be the part which this plays in that 
intelligent, purposive life which makes 



Theistic Idealism 275 

up the Absolute. In this Hfe, also, 
there is what we still may call the sen- 
sational content, although, of course, 
this no longer stands for something dis- 
tinct from itself, as our sensations do ; 
and this content to some extent is copied 
in the sensations which I get in looking 
at the tree : but here, again, the sensa- 
tional element only exists as it is used in 
a teleological way, and the real thing is 
the purpose or the meaning. We must, 
however, notice that we actually recog- 
nize anything as a separate object only 
when, for the moment, we cease to use 
it. While the artist is at work, he does 
not stop to think of his brush explicitly 
as a brush, but it enters simply as an 
element into the whole unitary conscious- 
ness of the experience he is undergoing. 
An object stands out separately, as an 
object, only as it ceases for the time 
being to be actively used, and, instead, 
is thought about; and we do not stop to 
think, unless we meet some difficulty 



276 Theistic Idealism 

which interferes with what we are doing. 
If the brush refuses to work well any 
longer, then the artist stops his painting 
and begins to examine the brush itself 
as an individual object. Our normal 
attitude, in other words, is not thinking 
about things, but doing them ; thinking 
is a mere instrument, which ultimately 
must issue in action, and which has for 
its function the getting rid of difficulties 
which have brought our activity to a 
standstill. And it is, again, only as 
they are thought about, not as they enter 
into active life, that objects seem to pos- 
sess for us that separateness of existence 
which we commonly have in mind in the 
notion of objects. This has, therefore, 
to be remembered when we try to inter- 
pret the real nature of the external 
world. Our own life is made up of con- 
crete experience, and it is immediately 
open to us as a whole, and so we are 
under less temptation to think of it in 
terms of its component parts ; but the 



Theistic Idealism 277 

ultimate reality of the absolute experi- 
ence we are able to get at only indirectly, 
through the perception of individual ob- 
jects, which we then proceed to build 
together into a world. And it conse- 
quently seems to us as if the problem 
were to introduce, in a secondary way, 
a connection between objects which first 
of all are separate. But now we are 
able to recognize that it only is the limi- 
tations belonging to our way of approach 
to a knowledge of the world, which gives 
rise to such an assumption. Our own 
life is experienced as a unity to begin 
with, and so the same difficulty is not 
present there ; but God's life we do not 
thus experience, but only come to know 
it piecemeal, through perception or 
thought. This collection of fragments, 
however, is not the reality; the reality 
is the unitary conscious life, within 
which objects are not felt at all as sepa- 
rate, any more than the brush is felt as 
separate when the artist uses it in paint- 



278 Theistic Idealism 

ing. Reality, in other words, is not the 
static existence which we take it to be 
for the purposes of thought, but it is a 
conscious activity; objects have no exist- 
ence, really, except as they enter into 
such a dynamic process. 

In the same way we shall have also a 
key to the solution of that problem of 
causation which, especially since the 
time of Hume, has occupied so large a 
place in philosophical discussions. We 
have seen how hard it is to conceive of 
a connecting link between events, and 
yet common sense decidedly objects to 
Hume's conclusion, that the mere follow- 
ing of one event upon another in time 
will exhaust all that we mean by causa- 
tion. Evidently we mean to express 
more than this when we use the word; 
we mean that one event somehow de- 
pends upon another. And in the con- 
ception of reality as a conscious life, 
the expression of a rational purpose, we 
have the only clew to what such a con- 



Theistic Idealism 279 

nection can be like. Two events will 
have an intelligible bond between them, 
if they both are elements in the working 
out of a conscious end : one will con- 
dition the other, not through its own 
power as a separate thing, but as one 
step in a process conditions the next 
step, through the controlling influence 
of a purpose, which only can carry itself 
out by the intelligent selection of means 
which mutually implicate one another. 
Again we come back to the recognition 
that, to understand the possibility of a 
unity of things, we must presuppose this 
unity at the start, and can never build 
it up by adding separate things together; 
and the only unity we can understand is 
the unity of end or purpose, in which 
the parts are related to each other as 
those steps which are mutually involved 
in carrying the purpose out. What we 
call power, then, or force, is not an 
external something operating between 
separate objects ; it stands for the re- 



280 Theistic Idealism 

storing of that element of activity, of 
the fact of belonging originally to a uni- 
tary process, which for the time had 
been ignored. Force, in other words, 
when translated into conscious terms, 
is will; but by will, again, we shall not 
mean a special power which enters into 
our life at particular points in order to 
direct it. Our whole life is a life of 
action, of movement, and this movement 
is what we mean by will ; it is not some- 
thing which interferes in the conscious 
life, but that whole life, as an activity, is 
its expression. 

It seems to be possible, then, to get 
an intelligible notion of what the nature 
of the outer world may be, by applying 
to it that concept of a conscious life, of 
which we find the possibility in our 
own experience. But we have not yet 
got reality completely defined. What 
we know simply as nature cannot be 
the whole of such a consciousness, any 
more than we can state our own life in 



Theistic Idealism 281 

terms of the framework of objective 
facts which enters into it, to the exclu- 
sion of the side of meaning, of emotional 
appreciation and spiritual significance. 
We cannot conceive of reality in purely- 
natural terms because, in the first place, 
it is an activity, -and an activity involves 
an end, which goes beyond anything in 
the way of mere natural phenomena ; 
and, in the second place, the natural 
world does not take in our own con- 
scious lives, and the facts of social devel- 
opment, which yet form a very essential 
part of the universe. We may try to 
make our conception of reality more 
definite, then, by considering it in con- 
nection with this problem of the rela- 
tion which the ultimate reality bears to 
finite selves. 

We shall have to assume at the start 
that what we call a self cannot possibly 
be understood in isolation, but must be 
regarded, like everything else, as a part 
of the whole universe, in which it has a 



282 Theistic Idealism 

certain place, and performs a certain 
function. But there are two general 
directions in which the nature of this 
connection of the self with the universe 
may be looked for. We may hold that 
it enters into the world self as part of 
a continuous consciousness, as a sensa- 
tion is a part of my conscious life; or 
we may accept the apparent separate- 
ness of the world from the life of indi- 
viduals, and may try to conceive of the 
unity in a way which shall not be incom- 
patible with a relative independence. 
The latter is the attitude of theism, as 
the former is of pantheism. 

The ground for this difference in con- 
ception goes back largely to a differ- 
ence which has already been suggested, 
but which needs to be brought out more 
distinctly — the difference between the 
idea of reality as a passive state of con- 
sciousness, and as an activity, reality as 
thought, and as active will. The ten- 
dency in philosophy has always been 



Theistic Idealism 283 

to represent the Absolute, after the 
analogy of abstract thought, as a kind 
of static existence. When I think about 
any particular reality, I assume that it 
is not changing in the meanwhile, or 
else I should be meaning something dif- 
ferent each successive moment, or rather 
I should never know what I really 
did mean. The ideal for thought, that 
is, is to grasp reality in a single pulse 
of consciousness, within which each ele- 
ment shall take its proper place, and the 
whole form a complete and absolutely 
exhaustive system. Taking reality as 
such a timeless conscious whole, a whole 
of knowledge, it is hardly possible to see 
how any finite life can come into a unity 
with it, except as it forms directly one 
of its component parts. If reality is a fact 
complete once for all, anything existing in 
any sense apart from it would seem to 
have no excuse for being. 

A theory of this sort is open, however, 
to several objections. The gist of the 



284 Theistic Idealism 

conception, once more, amounts to this. 
There is a certain fact, my conscious life, 
which seems to be a somewhat limited 
affair, but this apparent limitation is in 
reality an illusion. Beyond my life there 
stretches, without break, a wider life, 
which has the same consciousness that 
I have, but much more besides; and the 
perplexities and contradictions of life, for 
me, are only the result of this limitation, 
while for a more inclusive consciousness 
they are reduced to harmony. But now 
the implication of this would seem to 
be, that the notion we can get of reality 
is so infinitely removed from the final 
truth, that it is hard to make the differ- 
ence between what for us seems truth, 
and error, a very vital matter. False- 
hood is only limitation; everything is 
true, but it may not be the whole truth; 
and it only can grow truer as the circle 
of its existence widens to take in a con- 
stantly increasing area of reality. But 
then the truth of any state of conscious- 



Theistic Idealism 285 

ness is measured directly, so to speak, 
by the amount of room it takes up in 
the total sum of the universe. We can- 
not speak of all reality being present 
ideally in each particular fact ; it may 
be true that an absolute vision could 
see such implications in it, but for its 
own consciousness each fact is only the 
part which it seems to be, and is more 
or less true according as it is a greater 
or a smaller part. And when we think 
how infinitely small a part of the uni- 
verse any conscious life makes up, we 
have to face the suspicion that com- 
pleter reality may, and in all likelihood 
does, so overwhelm the little piece of 
truth that we have got, as to make it 
practically unrecognizable. Between the 
worst of human error, and its highest 
truth, there must be a vastly smaller 
gulf than between this latter and the 
all-inclusive unity ; and if the possession 
of perfect knowledge is the goal of liv- 
ing, as on this theory it would seem to 



286 Theistic Idealism 

be, the effort, in the face of such pitiful 
results, hardly seems worth the while. 
If this conclusion seems not altogether 
certain, there is another difficulty which 
is perhaps more obvious. Nothing can 
have the least pretensions to reality, on 
such a theory, which does not enter into 
the all-embracing consciousness of God. 
But is it possible to hold to this, and 
still admit the apparent limitation of 
human life.'' There cannot be the slight- 
est doubt that our experience seems to 
us, truly enough, to be a limited one ; but 
how is it possible to conceive of such a 
limitation in God's life } If the barriers 
are all taken away for him, how does the 
limit in any sense still remain .? It may 
be said that, as the sense of the limit is 
a fact for us, so also it will enter, as 
something which he knows, into God's 
consciousness, although he does not feel 
it as a limitation. And it is pointed out 
that a belief which at one time may for 
us be final, can, as a result of subse- 



Theistic Idealism 287 

quent experience, take its place within 
a larger unity, which, while it recognizes 
the partial truth of this belief, transforms 
it by means of a completer knowledge. 
But that whole conscious state which the 
former belief represents is not trans- 
ferred bodily into the later experience ; 
on the contrary, we recognize that our 
present state is altogether different from 
the other one, and that the two can 
exist only as experiences distinct in time, 
and not together. With our former be- 
lief there went a certain tone of feeling, 
an emotional tinge, — the feeling, it may 
be, of despair; that feeling now is gone, 
and there only remains a knowledge of 
it, as of something in the past. So also 
if we grant that our sense of limitation 
enters into God's knowledge, we are by 
that very fact making it an altogether 
different thing, for God, from what it is 
for us. God may know it, but he can- 
not feel it as we do. For us it per- 
meates and gives color to our entire 



288 Theistic Idealism 

conscious life, and this is something that 
it cannot do for God, unless he too is 
limited. If, then, the feeling of limita- 
tion is a fact, it is a fact which cannot 
exist within the life of God. The very 
insistence upon the transformation which 
our experience undergoes in the con- 
sciousness of God, is a direct admission 
that it is not our experience which 
exists there ; it cannot be the same if 
it has been transformed. The whole 
theory is based upon the fallacy of sup- 
posing that a conscious fact is a hard 
and fast thing, which can enter into all 
sorts of combinations, and still remain 
unaltered. The truth is that the being 
of a conscious fact is constituted very 
largely by its setting. Even the sensa- 
tion which I get from an object is not 
just the same sensation before and after 
I begin to attend explicitly to it; the 
sensation is changed by its altered rela- 
tionships. It is impossible, then, to say 
that my conscious life enters into a larger 



Theistic Idealism 289 

consciousness, except by confusing my 
experience as I feel it, with a knowledge 
of this experience on the part of God. 
But, as we have seen, a knowledge of 
anything never is the thing itself, but 
always implies the separate existence of 
what is known. So that it does not 
seem to be possible to merge finite ex- 
perience in a universal experience, and 
leave it with no separate existence of its 
own ; if it really were part of such a 
wider experience, the illusion of finite- 
ness and limitation would not exist. 

We have seen that the theory is based 
upon the conception of reality as a state 
of knowledge, and of perfect reality as a 
complete state of knowledge, in which 
everything has its place as an element. 
At best this makes human achievement a 
wholly negative thing, the mere question 
of a trifle more or less of error, which, 
however, can never be wholly overcome. 
And since truth already exists perfect and 
complete, it seems a useless trouble thus 



290 Theistic Idealism 

to multiply imperfect copies of itself. Nor 
is it very clear that a mere state of know- 
ledge, as a timeless act, gives after all the 
unity to life which philosophy is in search 
of. It is the business of thought to hold 
things apart, to distinguish, and we have 
found how difficult it is, when once things 
are separated, ever to get them together 
again. The only unity we have been able 
to discover is the unity of end or purpose ; 
but purpose involves activity, and activity 
seems to have no place in a world of 
unchanging truth, complete from the 
beginning. 

To turn, then, to the second alternative, 
if we accept the results of the previous 
chapters, and look at ultimate reality, not 
as it is for abstract thought, but as a move- 
ment, which, indeed, we can think of, but 
which can never actually be present in any 
thought experience, but only known by it, 
we may perhaps be able to gain a concep- 
tion of the unity of the world which at 
least will not be open to the foregoing 



Theistic Idealism 291 

objections, and which will admit the 
amount of separateness on the part of 
individual selves which common sense de- 
mands, without making them separate 
absolutely. If we look for that which 
forms the essence of our own conscious 
lives, we shall find that it consists in work- 
ing actively for a social end. Our life is 
what we do, consciously realized ; and this 
doing involves of necessity the world and 
other selves. I am born into a social 
world, just as I am born into a physical 
world, and a life that should be purely 
individual, that did not act continually 
with reference to its social environment, 
would be an unthinkable abstraction. We 
have our unity, therefore, in that common 
end which binds all actions together, and 
which each self may consciously appreci- 
ate ; and yet that does not prevent the in- 
dividual from having his own life, which 
others realize in its effects and its relation- 
ships, but which no one but himself can 
immediately experience. Every act is an 



292 Theistic Idealism 

act in a common world, which has innu- 
merable consequences for every other be- 
ing, and which, in its place, is an essential 
act, without which the world could not be 
what it is. And the conscious apprecia- 
tion of those acts which we call ours, is 
what makes up our conscious lives. In 
so far as the act is overt, what we call a 
physical act, it literally changes the whole 
world, and through its results it is known 
by, and influences, others than ourselves. 
But our conscious appreciation of the act 
and its results — and this, as we shall see, 
determines the act to be what it is — is 
ours alone. Because the act really has 
these social results, and because we can 
know them, and intend them to work, as 
they do, for a common end, the world is a 
unity, and each act of our lives has the 
value which comes from being an essential 
step in the world's progress ; but because, 
also, our immediate consciousness of the 
act is, as a direct sensational experience, 
a thing which no one but ourselves can 



Theistic Idealism 293 

have, our life has a certain separateness 
from all the rest of the universe, although 
it never would exist unless it were a con- 
sciousness which, through the medium of 
its physical expression, formed an essential 
element in the meaning of this world be- 
yond it. If, then, we transfer this to the 
absolute experience, the highest concep- 
tion we can get of the world is the con- 
ception of a social whole, within which 
God represents that ultimate self upon 
which all the rest depend. In this way 
we perhaps may get some notion of how 
it should be possible that God can have a 
conscious life distinct from ours, and yet 
including it. As soon as we speak of God 
as another self, we are met at once with 
the objection that this limits God, because 
it makes him less than the whole ; while, 
on the other hand, our own reality is en- 
dangered, if we are put outside of God. 
But after all it is not clear why the con- 
cept of creative power, working in accord- 
ance with a conscious purpose, should not 



294 Theistic Idealism 

furnish all the unity we need. Why- 
should we not suppose that the nature of 
the Absolute self is, like ours, essentially 
a social nature, and that his life is a con- 
scious life of active cooperation in a social 
world with finite selves, whom he himself 
brings into being ? In this way each self 
may have its own inviolable selfhood of 
immediate experience, which no one but 
itself can be^ and which all others, God 
included, can only know, while yet we do 
not need to take the self as an original 
and inexplicable bit of existence quite in- 
dependent of God. Ultimately it has no 
real independence, since it comes into be- 
ing through the power of God and with 
reference to his purposes, while its every 
act enters into the meaning of God's life, 
which itself is constituted by those social 
relationships whose development forms the 
truth of history. Unless we are ready to 
deny outright that God can have the power 
to grant to individual selves the enjoyment 
of a life from which, as immediate feeling, 



Theistic Idealism 295 

though not in the form of knowledge, he 
excludes even himself, there does not seem 
to be any difificulty in the way of such a 
theory which is insuperable, and it has the 
advantage of giving to that concept of 
social life, which modern thought is tend- 
ing more and more to come back to as its 
final word, a basis in the inmost and essen- 
tial reality of the world. 

There has already been implied in 
this a certain conception of what the 
nature of a self consists in. Hume was 
not able to find the self, and naturally 
so, for the reason that he looked for it 
in some particular element of conscious- 
ness, whereas it is the conscious life in 
its entirety, taken, however, not as a 
string of conscious states, but as an ac- 
tivity, as bound together in the unity of 
a conscious purpose. The real essence 
of selfhood is this : the consciousness 
of an active experience, in which each 
step is bound together with every other 
by its relation to an inclusive end, which 



296 Theistic Idealism 

is immediately realized in every part. 
Self-consciousness, therefore, does not 
mean an occupation with oneself to the 
exclusion of everything else; while the 
act is the act of the self, it is also an 
act with numberless relationships, which 
constitute its meaning, and which, as 
such, are consciously realized. The self 
is social in its very nature. This imme- 
diate experience has value only as it 
is felt to enter into the larger unity of 
the world. True self-consciousness is 
a consciousness of the value of the act 
which makes up the self, in terms, how- 
ever, of the social whole into which the 
act enters as an element. While, how- 
ever, this definition will serve in a gen- 
eral way, there seems after all to be 
something in the conception of a finite 
self which it fails to cover. If our con- 
scious life were, not a partial, but a per- 
fect whole, if a single purpose ruled it 
consciously from first to last, which we 
felt summed up our entire nature, and 



Theistic Idealism 297 

so if our whole being were consciously 
expressed in each successive moment of 
experience, then the mere statement of 
our conscious life would adequately state 
the self. And something of this nature 
we may suppose the ultimate self to 
be. But our own lives are far more 
dependent and more fragmentary than 
this comes to, and we can hardly avoid 
feeling that there is some justification 
for the old idea of a substance or soul 
which lies back of, and furnishes the 
foundation for, our clearly conscious self. 
Any act that we perform seems to us 
to express only a part of ourselves ; 
back of it there are all those latent 
habits which make up our "character,." 
all the realm of the unconscious; and 
what are we to say of what we call 
the tendencies of our nature, the hidden 
impulses and dispositions whose existence 
we never surmise till some occasion calls 
them forth, and we suddenly wake up 
to find ourselves such persons as we 



298 Theistic Idealism 

never had suspected ? We have no 
need to dispute the facts, but what they 
stand for is simply this, that the roots 
of our being lie far deeper in reality 
than any explicit consciousness of ours. 
We do not need, however, to take the 
"soul" as something mysterious and 
unknown ; we have a very tangible 
reality at hand already in the human 
body, where science long ago found the 
explanation of just these facts we are 
trying to account for. But this does 
not mean that the foundation of the 
self is matter; we must interpret it in 
accordance with our conclusion as to 
what the reality of matter is. For the 
body represents only a certain element 
in the conscious life of the Absolute — 
the point of connection between the in- 
dependent reality of our own conscious 
existence, and the rest of the universe. 
It represents the capital which is given 
us to start with, a capital which, as evo- 
lution shows, sums up a long line of 



Theistic Idealism 299 

achievement in the past, and connects 
us with the history of the whole world. 
Our conscious self, the true moral and 
responsible self, the self as the whole 
of an experience which is consciously 
realized, represents the use which is 
made of this capital. It is because our 
conscious life comes back constantly to 
the organic body, and is based from be- 
ginning to end upon the activities of 
that life process which, again, is only 
an element in the larger process of the 
world, that it never can be merely indi- 
vidual, but must always be the conscious- 
ness of a life which is dependent and 
related. But each conscious act not only 
grows out of bodily conditions, but in 
turn it modifies these conditions ; it reg- 
isters itself in the body, and, through 
that, by means of the bodily activities, 
in reality as a whole. In the structure 
of the body our whole past achievement 
lies summed up, ready to assert itself 
when the occasion comes. That more 



300 Theistic Idealism 

fundamental self, then, which lies be- 
hind the passing conscious expression, 
is in reality the whole sum of our origi- 
nal capital and of the modifications in 
it which our life experience has pro- 
duced, indelibly imprinted in what we 
call the material world, but which is 
actually the life of God. 

In addition to the problems which have 
thus been briefly noticed, there is one 
other fundamental difficulty which has 
come into a special prominence in con- 
nection with the results of scientific 
theory. It is a difficulty which has been 
spoken of already. Our conscious life 
is something which exists beyond those 
physical facts which science deals with, 
and apparently it does not come under 
the same laws with them. Every fact 
in the world of matter science tries to 
account for on purely physical grounds, 
as due to previous physical conditions ; 
and so consciousness would seem to be 
a mere impertinence when it comes to 



Theistic Idealism 301 

explaining an event in the outer world, 
and it would not appear to have the 
power of exerting any influence what- 
ever, without breaking into the scientific 
formulae. It has, accordingly, become 
a widely accepted theory, that physical 
facts, represented in the movements of 
the brain, and conscious facts, go along, 
indeed, parallel to each other, but with- 
out any causal relationship between them. 
Consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, 
a bare added fact, which has no signifi- 
cance in determining what the course of 
physical events shall be. 

In so far as such a theory supposes 
that matter is the reality of which mind 
is only an unnecessary adjunct, or, again, 
as with Spinoza, that mind and matter 
are equally real aspects or sides of a 
single ultimate existence, it already has 
been sufficiently criticised. It is impossi- 
ble to keep matter and consciousness thus 
on an equality, since, as we have seen, 
the former is known only in conscious 



302 Theistic Idealism 

terms. The very phrase " sides or as- 
pects " has no meaning except as we post- 
ulate a consciousness within which they 
appear as aspects, and so consciousness 
gets at once the upper hand. There is, 
however, still another possible conception 
which avoids this epistemological diffi- 
culty. We may grant, that is, the ideal- 
istic result that consciousness is the sole 
reality, and maintain that the material 
world is only the phenomenal aspect of 
what in its real nature is a conscious 
existence. That particular bit of reality 
which makes up my own life I experience 
immediately as consciousness, but all other 
reality I know only indirectly, and it 
appears to me phenomenally in terms of 
matter. But I can infer the nature of 
the reality behind these phenomena, be- 
cause I know one section of it already 
in my own conscious life. 

The advantage of the theory lies in 
this, that it enables us to admit the scien- 
tific demand that consciousness should not 



Theistic Idealism 303 

come in to interfere with physical laws, 
and still does not compel us to thrust 
consciousness aside as a nonentity in the 
universe. Consciousness does not inter- 
fere with matter, because matter is con- 
sciousness ; there is no second thing to 
come in from the outside. Another person 
looking at me sees a body and a nervous 
system, acting in accordance with certain 
laws ; my consciousness does not influence 
these laws as a foreign fact, because the 
reality of what another person sees as 
a nervous change is my consciousness. 
What I experience directly as a conscious 
fact appears to an observer phenomenally 
as a brain movement, and physical laws 
are but the phenomenal side of conscious 
laws. Just as my brain, accordingly, 
represents my conscious life, so every 
physical fact is, we may suppose, in 
reality a conscious fact; and as each 
physical phenomenon enters into a larger 
combination with other phenomena to 
form at last the universe, a great whole 



304 Theistic Idealism 

bound together by universal laws, so the 
realities for which these phenomena stand 
enter into more and more comprehensive 
combinations, till they finally make up the 
universal consciousness of God. 

We have already had occasion to notice 
some of the difficulties which a theory 
like this suggests. It has just been seen 
that the conception of individual selves 
as entering directly into a universal con- 
sciousness is not a satisfactory one. Then, 
too, the theory fails entirely to meet those 
requirements which were brought out in 
analyzing knowledge. It is not clear how 
we can get to a knowledge that anything 
exists at all beyond our own bit of con- 
sciousness ; and since at best we can 
know it, in detail, only as it is noty we 
do not seem to be very far advanced. 
And one other consideration now may be 
added to these. That which I call my 
brain is, in reality, my conscious life, and 
of this conscious life it is clear that the 
mathematical relationships which science 



Theistic Idealism 305 

finds in my brain movements form no 
part whatsoever. Since, then, this par- 
ticular bit of reality is only what it is for 
consciousness, the relationships of science 
are not present in it; they are phe- 
nomena, and only exist for another mind. 
But now for complete reality, or God, 
there can be no appearance, but things 
are seen only as they are ; phenomenal 
existence is only possible to that which 
is a part of reality, and for which there 
is another part outside itself which can 
appear to it. So that the conclusion 
seems to be that the facts of science 
have no existence for the ultimate reality, 
or God. If God were really conscious 
of that framework of the world which 
science constructs, I also, it would seem, 
ought to be immediately conscious of the 
particular part of this which corresponds 
to the section of reality which I make 
up, since there is no more to this section 
of reality than I am conscious of. While, 
then, the theory is originated to meet the 



306 Theistic Idealism 

demands of scientific method, it fails 
after all to furnish any sufficient basis 
for science to rest upon. 

We may still ask, therefore, whether 
it may not be possible to justify the de- 
mand of science that everything should 
be explained in terms of mechanism or 
natural law, with which no outside influ- 
ence is to be permitted in any way to in- 
terfere, on the theory which has already 
been suggested in the present chapter. 
The question evidently at bottom is that 
of the relation of mechanism to teleology, 
and in order to answer it we must con- 
sider more carefully what is really im- 
plied in these two concepts. And we 
shall find that the trouble has been 
caused by taking mechanism as if it 
stood for a final explanation, whereas it 
only tells us about the how of a thing, 
the way in which, not the reason for 
which, it is done. There is, consequently, 
no inherent contradiction between mech- 
anism and teleology, if we drop the idea 



Theistic Idealism 307 

that the latter is a special force, which 
some things can be explained without, 
but which needs occasionally to be in- 
voked as a superior and supernatural 
influence. Mechanism will not exclude 
teleology, if only we admit that a pur- 
posive act does not have necessarily to be 
a lawless act, but may show in its working 
a perfectly definite law or mechanism. 
Mechanism, once more, simply denotes 
the relationships which are expressed in 
how a thing is done, and it makes no 
difference to it that the doing should all 
the while be working out an intelligent 
end. The notion that it does make a 
difference depends upon a conception of 
reality which already has been found un- 
tenable — the notion that the essence of 
reality is in the parts of which it is com- 
posed, and not in the whole. So we take 
a number of individual atoms, and sup- 
pose that each, with its own separate 
motion, is the original fact, and then that 
they combine mechanically to form cer- 



308 Theistic Idealism 

tain secondary products. But actually 
the motion of each atom is what it is only 
as it forms a part of the whole world. 
It has no existence by itself, but only as 
the one universe has a particular expres- 
sion in it. And this world, again, we 
have seen can be conceived as a unity 
only as it is a unity of conscious pur- 
pose. Teleology, therefore, comes first, 
the unity of the purposive life of God. 
But that purposive life does not move at 
haphazard, but in accordance with law, 
with order, with regularity. Between the 
different elements in it which, in com- 
ing to know the world, we distinguish, 
there are relationships which we repre- 
sent in terms of mathematically exact 
laws. These laws show how reality acts, 
and enable us to forecast and govern the 
processes of nature ; why they act in this 
way is not a problem for science, but for 
philosophy and life. Conceivably all 
natural processes might be reduced to a 
single formula, but that would make real- 



Theistic Idealism 309 

ity no whit less purposive. It is not a 
question between purpose and law, but 
between purpose and chance, and that 
the world is governed by chance, science 
itself is as much interested to disprove 
as philosophy. It is, indeed, all the more 
difficult, now that science, in the theory 
of evolution, has shown the unity of the 
world so clearly, to resist the impression 
of purpose of some sort in the long 
stretch of material development and of 
social growth. Reality is not simply the 
swirl of nebulous mist with which the 
process starts, but it is the process as a 
whole; and if the issue has shown itself 
to be in some degree a harmonious and 
intelligible one, we have no right to take 
it as a mere chance result from given 
conditions, but rather we must take it as 
reality more adequately defined. But if 
this is true, then the ultimate statement 
of the world is not that mechanism of 
atoms and forces which science con- 
structs in order to embody her laws ; this, 



310 Theistic Idealism 

which is only an inference from the liv- 
ing world which meets our senses, never 
can displace the more original data from 
which it is derived. If reality is a living 
experience, there is no reason why it 
should not possess for itself all the 
warmth and immediacy and richness 
which our own sensuous life possesses ; 
the abstract world of science is the mere 
framework of this, which tells us in 
mathematical terms how it works, but 
which may easily turn our eyes away 
from its essential nature and meaning. 

Since, then, natural laws are not the 
cause and presupposition of reality, but 
require themselves to be explained ulti- 
mately as the expression of a purposive 
life, our own conscious life may help 
determine these laws, without at all inter- 
fering with their regularity and scientific 
precision. My purpose does not direct 
the movement of my body by coming in 
to change the nature of laws already 
physically determined, but since my con- 



Theistic Idealism 311 

scious life is an essential element in the 
meaning which constitutes God's life, and 
enters into his purpose as a part of it, 
it helps as such to determine what the 
laws of his working, which are revealed 
to us in that external world which in- 
cludes our own bodies, are to be, without 
preventing these laws from being as regu- 
lar and as mathematically exact as science 
demands. Our conscious life is part of 
the meaning which is the reality of the 
world, and which, therefore, determines, 
not as an afterthought, but in the first 
place, the laws of the world. Science 
has nothing to do but note what, as a 
matter of fact, the laws are, regardless 
of how they may have come to be, and 
consequently does not need to take into 
its account the world of meaning, to 
which the conscious lives of individuals, 
as distinct from their bodily actions, 
belong. 



SCEPTICISM AND THE CRI- 
TERION OF TRUTH 



SCEPTICISM AND THE CRI- 
TERION OF TRUTH 




O philosophical theory that 
has been or is ever likely to 
be propounded is, we may 
venture to say, self-evident, or fitted to 
carry conviction at once to every mind. 
There are certain tests to which it must 
submit, certain standards which it has 
to meet, in order that its validity may 
appear. These tests, however, are them- 
selves a matter more or less of dispute. 
What is the sort of standard we are jus- 
tified in demanding that philosophical 
truth should come up to ? If we can an- 
swer this, and can settle just the measure 
of validity which our theory claims for it- 
self, we may be in a position to guard 
315 



316 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

against certain objections which otherwise 
might prove formidable. 

Scepticism is essentially a demand for 
the criterion of truth, and it frequently 
has assumed an importance in philosophy 
which seems very much out of proportion 
to the part which healthy doubt plays in 
our practical life. If in practical affairs 
we were to hesitate to act until we had 
absolute and demonstrative certainty, we 
never should begin to move at all; cer- 
tain cases do indeed occur where a ten- 
dency like this is shown, but they are 
recognized at once as pathological. Action 
is our normal condition, and doubt is 
strictly subordinate to action ; it does 
not mean a complete suspension of judg- 
ment, but only enough of it to make our 
action more effective. Why, then, should 
scepticism in philosophy so often depart 
from this, and stand out as a final atti- 
tude } It can be justified in doing so only 
on one particular assumption as to what 
the nature of truth in philosophy is. This 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 317 

assumption separates philosophy from life 
in two ways. It assumes that philosophi- 
cal truth is sufficiently removed from the 
business of living, to render it practicable 
for us to demand in this way a sort of 
proof which we have no time to wait for 
in other spheres; it makes it, in other 
words, a pure matter of theory, and not 
of practice at all. And it also divorces 
philosophy from the rest of life by making 
it the ideal of philosophy to sum up truth 
in a final and complete way, with no more 
possibility of growth, whereas life itself is 
essentially a development. But now it 
may be questioned whether such a con- 
ception of what truth consists in is not 
altogether a mistake. 

Upon what is the possibility of logical 
proof based } We can easily enough see 
that it cannot be anything in the nature 
of an external connection, which can 
reach out and grip two separate proposi- 
tions together. Once more we have to 
recognize that, in the logical no more 



318 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

than in the physical realm, can the parts 
come first and the connection afterwards ; 
we never can get a unity which is not a 
unity to start with. Proof, then, demands 
a whole within which there exists a cer- 
tain interrelation of parts, of such a nature 
that they mutually imply one another. 
Suppose we take the logical process known 
as inference. A heap of shells is found 
in some place now uninhabited, and we 
infer that formerly human beings had 
encamped there. Do we simply pass from 
the particular fact of the shells to another 
isolated fact, the existence of a prehistoric 
group of savages.'' By no means; we 
might look at the shells forever, and if 
they furnished all our data, they would 
never carry us a step. If we are asked 
the proof of our inference, we find that 
we have really been postulating the known 
reality of savage life, in which both the 
savages on the one hand, and their habits 
of life and relationship to their food en- 
vironment on the other, play a part ; and 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 3 19 

we can pass from one element of this to 
another, just because there is presupposed 
the unity which includes them both as 
related factors. So what in general I do 
when I try to prove any fact, is to get it 
inside a more comprehensive statement 
of reality, with whose other elements it is 
connected by such lines of relationship 
that, when they are admitted, it follows 
as the natural result ; and the more lines 
of connection it can be shown to have 
with other admitted facts, the more solidly 
its own reality is considered established. 

But now, if this represents the actual 
process of proof, it renders demonstration, 
in the strict sense, out of the question. 
In order to prove anything, we must al- 
ways postulate some larger reality which 
is taken to require no proof; and so, if 
we go back far enough, the ultimate basis 
of logical demonstration is our experience 
as a whole, and all the facts of reality 
which it has brought us into contact with. 
Logical proof only applies to the connec- 



320 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

tion of elements within this, and not to 
the fundamental datum itself; that has 
to be taken simply as something given to 
us in experience, which might have been 
different, but which, as a matter of fact, 
is what it is. The ideal, then, from this 
standpoint, would be a complete system 
intellectually stated, a system so articu- 
lated that each part would imply, and be 
implied by, all the rest. Consequently 
the test is consonancy with experience as 
a concrete whole, and not immediate cer- 
tainty. We do not, in other words, go 
back along a line which constantly grows 
more abstract and meagre in content, until 
we reach certain very abstract truths, 
which themselves cannot be proved be- 
cause they are immediately self-evident; 
but rather our direction is towards greater 
and greater inclusiveness and concreteness. 
The difference is a very considerable one. 
We can be logically certain only of the 
process of deduction, but in any case 
there must be a certain basis of fact 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 32 1 

which is not proved, but assumed, in order 
that the deduction should be possible. If 
we take these postulates, on the one hand, 
as certain abstract truths, each one of 
these must stand solely on its own foun- 
dation. We may say, for example, that 
we cannot help believing the postulate, 
because we find it impossible to think its 
opposite. But then the sceptic may ask 
again. How do you know that reality must 
correspond to your thought.? and to this 
it is difficult to give an answer. When, 
on the other hand, we fall back on expe- 
rience as a whole, we have, again, to 
assume this as a fact, for which it is idle 
to ask for demonstrative proof. It is 
quite possible to conceive that reality 
should have been utterly different, and 
so we cannot say "must," but only "is." 
And yet we do not feel the same help- 
lessness here that we did in the other 
case, for we have not an isolated dictum, 
but the whole of experience to rely on ; 
and practically, if not theoretically, we 



322 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

cannot ask for any more solid ground than 
this. If we can see that any fact is 
thoroughly consistent with all the other 
facts that we know, we have, in a prac- 
tical way, no very good reason to com- 
plain. 

Of course, in the example which has 
just been given, there not only is as- 
sumed the fact of savage life, but it also 
is taken for granted that we know enough 
about the relationships which savage life 
involves to detect in it certain general 
principles or laws, of which the particu- 
lar instance is an application. These 
laws of connection within reality, which 
enable it to form a system, and which 
make possible our reasoning about the 
world, are not by any means self-evi- 
dent, and a theory of logic would find 
an important part of its task in determin- 
ing the processes by which we attempt 
to dissect the immediate and confused 
data of experience, and to simplify it 
sufficiently to discover the relationships 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 323 

of its parts. It is not necessary to con- 
sider this problem in detail; we may 
point out, however, that such laws or 
general principles, also, imply just as 
truly the concrete whole of reality which 
experience presents, and which is itself 
not demonstrated, but only taken as it 
comes. The law. of causation has no 
real existence, except as it is embodied 
in a world of concrete causes and effects, 
a world which has to be assumed as a 
whole, before we can begin to look for 
the connection of its elements. If, then, 
reality were a purely intellectual affair, 
and if we were able to assume that the 
essential facts were all in our possession, 
we should have in the test of consist- 
ency a fairly adequate account of the 
matter. If we can take for granted that 
our past knowledge adequately repre- 
sents the world, then when any new fact 
makes its appearance, that explanation 
of it which renders it consistent with 
reality as already known, we shall call 



324 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

the true explanation, while any other will 
be false. But this clearly fails to give 
the weight which it deserves to a very 
evident characteristic of our knowledge, 
its partial and fragmentary nature. Any 
view which I may hold about the world 
not only may, but must, omit a very 
large proportion of the facts which really 
are pertinent, and consequently the abil- 
ity to harmonize those facts which I 
have already gotten hold of, can give me 
no positive assurance that added know- 
ledge might not change the result very 
materially. If it were true, as some, peo- 
ple are fond of asserting, that a fact is 
a fact, about which there is nothing more 
to be said, we might console ourselves 
with the belief that at least we could 
rely implicitly upon the truth of which 
we were already in possession, and that 
growth of knowledge could simply add 
to this, not change it; but in reality we 
have not got the true fact at all, but 
only a certain amount of raw material 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 325 

for it, until we know what the relation- 
ships are which help to constitute its 
nature ; and it is just these relationships 
which not only are now beyond our 
knowledge, but to some extent must al- 
ways be so. The mere fact, therefore, 
that the data which we have at hand 
are consistent, does not exclude the pos- 
sibility that further data would throw 
quite another light upon our theory. But 
practically, of course, we are not com- 
pelled to stop with the intellectual mate- 
rial we already possess, nor even to wait 
passively for new material to turn up ; 
but we can go to work to discover the 
data we are in need of by the process 
of active experiment. If we have any- 
thing that we desire to explain, and 
which, consequently, as the fact of its 
needing explanation shows, stands in 
some sort of opposition to other facts 
which we have been accustomed to ac- 
cept as true, the process which we go 
through is, in a general way, as follows : 



326 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

We cast about in our minds for some 
theory which will make the opposing 
facts harmonious, and when one suggests 
itself which we think is plausible, we at- 
tempt to fit the facts into it. Perhaps 
we succeed in doing this, and then the 
hypothesis which we have selected holds 
the field for the time being, as that which 
probably is true. As a matter of fact, 
however, we should seldom or never have 
a process which was quite so simple as 
this. Our first theory very likely will 
not hit the mark ; we find that if it were 
true, a certain consequence would follow 
which evidently contradicts the known 
facts; and so we reject it, and set to 
work again to discover an hypothesis 
which shall prove more adequate. Never- 
theless we have already made a little 
progress, even if only in a negative way ; 
we have at least shut out one alterna- 
tive, and by so doing have modified our 
data somewhat, since the meaning which 
they bear to us is now more definitely 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 327 

limited. And even when we do come 
across a theory which we are able to ac- 
cept, this theory does not appear all at 
once in its completeness, but only at 
first in the form of a rough draft; and 
it is not until after a prolonged process, 
in the course of which facts and theory 
alike undergo a gradual transformation, 
through the influence which each in turn 
exerts upon the other, that we succeed 
in getting the hypothesis moulded into a 
shape where we can rest satisfied with it. 
In any act of reasoning, accordingly, 
there is a twofold movement which is 
continually going on, from the facts which 
are given to an hypothesis which shall 
serve to harmonize them, and from this 
hypothesis, again, back to consequences 
which, if true, it would imply, and which 
we can thereupon compare with the facts, 
and so test whether the hypothesis is 
valid; and it is this latter movement 
which is the logical basis of experiment. 
But while in this sense we make use of 



328 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

the principle of experiment every time 
we reason at all, it is better for the sake 
of clearness to confine the term to a 
special class of processes by which we 
endeavor to arrive at truth. Taken on a 
somewhat larger scale, there are two at- 
titudes in reasoning which are compara- 
tively distinct, although we cannot say 
that either of them involves principles 
which are not also present in the other 
in a less conspicuous way. We may, and 
frequently do, in our reasoning, take a 
certain pretty definite group of known 
facts as practically exhausting the data 
which our hypothesis is to account for, 
and then the test by which we determine 
whether our theory is correct or not is 
sufficiently defined by calling it the test 
of consistency. Granted that such and 
such are the facts, I ask what theory 
will harmonize them, and that which does 
succeed in harmonizing them I take as 
the truth of the matter. But while it 
may be that for practical purposes I am 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 329 

justified in thus taking the data as suffi- 
ciently known, I am hardly justified in 
doing this in a theoretical way. Theo- 
retically, no truth is anything but a more 
or less probable hypothesis, and there- 
fore it must always be prepared to find 
a place for new and disturbing facts. 
My knowledge extends to only a very 
small portion of the universe, and even 
though I were fully convinced that all 
other facts were quite irrelevant, I might 
be, and probably I should be, altogether 
mistaken ; for in a world in which every- 
thing is bound up together, we never 
can be certain that the next fact which 
comes up may not compel us to revise 
our beliefs. If we are to be on the safe 
side, therefore, we must not only get a 
theory which reconciles the facts that 
are already given, but we must proceed 
to test this theory further, by an appeal 
to possible new facts, and that not in a 
passive way, by accepting them when 
they come to hand, but by actively look- 



330 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

ing for them. And in such a case we 
may describe the test of our hypothesis 
as the test of experiment. We cannot 
stop with saying, Granted the facts, this 
theory reconciles them, but we also are 
bound to go on and say. Granted the 
theory, this new fact ought, as a result, 
to be true; and then we are in a posi- 
tion to go to work to discover whether 
it actually is true or not. If it is not 
true, our theory, which included all pre- 
vious data, fails to meet the requirements 
of added knowledge, and so has to be 
abandoned ; if it is true, we have another 
reason for believing that the theory is 
also true. We have no| demonstrated 
the theory, but we have added to its 
probability ; the point at which we can 
stop, and call our theory so well estab- 
lished that it needs no further testing, 
is a practical question, which will be an- 
swered differently in different cases. 

We are not to suppose, however, that 
there is any real conflict between these 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 33 1 

two nominally different tests of truth, 
consistency and experiment ; and which 
we shall call the ultimate test, is only a 
matter of our point of view. Perhaps we 
may say that on the theoretical side con- 
sistency is the ultimate criterion, while ex- 
periment is superior to consistency only 
as a purely practical point of method. 
Theoretically, experiment itself implies 
the test of consistency behind it. Into 
the hypothesis he is testing the scientist 
has put all his knowledge of the world, 
and it only is because he now is certain 
that another fact, which circumstances 
make a very important one for him, 
harmonizes with the scheme into which 
he has fitted the rest of his knowledge, 
that the experiment is a test of truth at 
all. The mere fact of his getting a cer- 
tain experience which he sets out to get 
would mean nothing to him theoretically, 
though practically it might mean a great 
d^al, unless this experience stood for a 
vast framework of knowledge beyond it, 



332 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

which he is trying to make intellectually 
consistent. The necessity for experiment 
comes in, not because it takes the place 
of the test of consistency, but because 
our knowledge is confessedly fragmen- 
tary, and therefore theories which suit 
the facts as we know them now, may be 
inadequate to other facts which are just 
as real, but which we are not yet in pos- 
session of. Our aim is to harmonize all 
the facts of reality, but we cannot do this 
till we know what the facts are ; and it 
is because it helps us to determine the 
nature of the facts, in all their complex 
relationships, that experiment is of value. 
It teaches us what to look for, and so 
enables us to trace our way better 
through the tangle which immediate ex- 
perience presents, and to detect evidence 
which otherwise we should have passed 
unnoticed. And, in the stricter scientific 
sense of the word "experiment," it even 
makes it possible for us to produce new 
facts for ourselves at will, by controlling 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 333 

processes in the outer world; and since 
these results are secured under conditions 
which we are able to a certain extent to 
determine, they are more illuminating for 
our comprehension of the world than any- 
chance experience is Hkely to be. The 
scientist does not work simply in the in- 
tellectual realm ; he arranges all sorts of 
delicate instruments in order to test his 
hypothesis by facts. If he can act on a 
certain theory, and get the particular sen- 
sation which he expects from it, this is 
the test upon which he relies, rather than 
upon the apparent faultlessness of his 
theory in a purely intellectual way. But 
the reason why a careful experiment may 
give him more confidence than a mere 
intellectual hypothesis, no matter how 
apparently satisfactory, which has not 
been experimentally tested, is not be- 
cause experiment has superseded the test 
of consistency, but because he is perfectly 
aware that any knowledge which he may 
have at present is wofully deficient, both 



334 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

in extent and in exactness, and that, 
therefore, what seem to him now to be 
facts may be consistent, and still not 
stand the test of further contact with 
reality. Consistency is the goal which 
ultimately we are seeking, but the mere 
ideal of consistency is of no avail to us 
unless we know what the facts are which 
are to be consistent; and this we can dis- 
cover only by a process of intelligent 
search. 

But there is still another way, also, in 
which active experiment may be said to 
be more ultimate than intellectual con- 
sistency, and to understand this we may 
turn again to the part which knowledge 
as a whole plays in life. What purpose 
does thought serve for the practical man } 
Evidently the purpose of teaching him how 
to do that which he wants to do. So long 
as I am able to go on successfully with 
what I am interested in doing, I have 
no need for the thought process ; but 
when my activity is interrupted, it be- 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 335 

comes necessary to review the situation 
before I can take up the thread again. 
The interruption means that my past 
habits, to which a large share of my ac- 
tivities are due without needing any spe- 
cial reflective process to accompany them, 
no longer are able to meet the demands, 
but have to be changed to fall in with 
new conditions. When such a thing as 
this occurs, experience falls apart into 
two connected phases. On the one 
hand, we have certain definite material 
to work upon, — the present habit which 
needs to be changed, — and this is repre- 
sented in intellectual terms by the sen- 
sational or given element, which now is 
made to stand out definitely in conscious- 
ness for the purpose of revealing its de- 
fects, and which always has to be present 
in some form for thought to manipulate. 
If I am learning to do some new thing, 
for example, to ride a bicycle, I can only 
do it by utilizing those same past habits 
of walking, running, etc., which are so 



336 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

inadequate to meet the situation now, 
and which consequently require an atten- 
tion to be given them, which they never 
would have thought of demanding if, as 
before, I had simply kept on being con- 
tent to go afoot. But we cannot change 
these habits without having some idea, if 
only an indefinite one, of the direction in 
which the change has to be made, and 
this feeling of the end towards which we 
are all the time working, is represented 
in experience by the concept, or abstract 
thought, which thus is the element that 
controls the process of thinking,- and 
keeps it within the desired channels. 
The concept, on the practical side, is 
simply a theory or hypothesis which at- 
tempts to formulate the best way of doing 
what we have set out to do ; and if it is 
successful, if it meets the situation, and 
harmonizes the different and more or 
less contradictory elements which the 
situation presents, if, ultimately, we can 
act upon it, and act in a way that satis- 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 337 

fies us, then the theory has served its 
purpose. 

If, then, we are to find the explanation 
of practical knowledge in its relation to 
active life, we cannot deny the same office 
to knowledge in its higher and seemingly 
more independent aspects, without making 
an arbitrary division somewhere, and cut- 
ting off the theoretical life from any pos- 
sibility of a scientific explanation. The 
value of knowledge, then, is to be found 
only in the fact that it contributes, ulti- 
mately, to life ; it has no use purely in it- 
self, but is meant to be acted upon. And 
philosophical knowledge can be no excep- 
tion to the general rule. If it were an ex- 
ception, then ultimate scepticism not only 
would be possible, but it would be quite 
justifiable. So long as we are alive, we 
must of necessity keep on doing some- 
thing, and for most men their work is 
quite enough to occupy their thoughts. 
If now philosophy has nothing to say to 
the serious and necessary business of life. 



338 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

it can hardly complain if, with most people, 
it is allowed to fall into the background. 
But we have tried to show that this is a 
wrong conception of what philosophy is. 
It is just our work in the world that re- 
quires us, if this work is to be performed 
in anything more than a mechanical and 
unintelligent way, to understand the nature 
of the world in which we are working; 
and for this a philosophy is not only de- 
sirable, but it is inevitable. We may 
get along without this or that philosophy, 
but some theory or other, some attitude 
towards life, we must, as intelligent be- 
ings, necessarily adopt. And this attitude 
means so much to us because it is the 
theory on which we act. It will not de- 
termine how we are to build houses, or 
plough fields, at any rate directly; but 
over those larger activities which make 
up our essential life, over the general 
principles which guide us, ultimately, even 
in our most detailed work, its influence 
will be direct and all-important. We have 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 339 

now, accordingly, to examine a little more 
closely what relation this connection with 
life bears to the intellectual criterion of 
philosophical truth. 

If it is true that knowledge is of value 
to us, ultimately, because it teaches us how 
to act in the world, then our intellectual 
theories may be hypotheses in a sense 
which needs to be distinguished from the 
way in which we have used the term " hy- 
pothesis" hitherto. The belief that there 
is a fact of reality corresponding to my 
theory is worth something to me, because, 
in a given situation in which I am called 
upon to act, it may form the basis of an 
hypothesis as to what particular way of 
acting is best fitted to secure my ends, is 
the right thing for me to do. The con- 
cept, or theory, or statement of intellectual 
truth, is not in itself necessarily an hy- 
pothesis as to what action some particular 
occasion calls for, but in the end its use- 
fulness depends upon its being capable 
of serving as the foundation for such an 



340 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

hypothesis. And for an hypothesis in this 
latter sense, there is no final test except 
the test of acting on it. I cannot know 
for certain whether this particular plan 
will secure the end I have in view, except 
by trying it; and if it leads to the results 
which I expect, the hypothesis may be 
said to have been demonstrated. But it 
is evident that while, between the test of 
a practical hypothesis by action, and the 
test of an intellectual theory by experi- 
ment, there is a close connection, they are 
not by any means the same. Our attitude 
in the two cases is altogether different. 
The action of the scientist in performing 
an experiment in electricity, and of the 
electrician in using a scientific theory for 
practical ends, may be identically the 
same ; but the object of the one is to find 
out what would have been true objectively, 
even if the experiment never had been 
performed, while for the electrician the 
practical result is everything, and if he 
could have attained it on the basis of an 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 341 

hypothesis which the scientist would call 
absurd, he would have been just as well 
satisfied. An experiment may at the same 
time both test the objective truth of a 
theory, and demonstrate the practicability 
or impracticability of a plan of action, but 
the two things are not therefore to be 
confused. In so far as the latter may be 
called a test, it is a test of what, in the 
large sense, we may speak of as the moral 
question, — the question as to what particu- 
lar thing is, in a given situation, the right 
thing to do. Such a question is not one 
that we can settle satisfactorily on intel- 
lectual grounds alone, for the reason that 
what we are to decide about is a particular 
act which still remains to be performed, 
and which, therefore, has to meet a situa- 
tion different in some respect from any 
other situation that ever has arisen. The 
only decisive test, then, after we have to 
the best of our judgment considered the 
matter in the light of past experience, is 
to act, and see what happens. The hy- 



342 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

pothesis is tested by this act, as a particular 
act ; but it is so tested only because the 
question is not an intellectual but a moral 
one. The hypothesis is not that a certain 
thing is already true as a fact, but that a 
certain thing ought to be done as an act. 
And in the latter case it is possible to 
have proof that amounts to certainty. Let 
us suppose that I wish to manufacture a 
certain gas ; I go to work, on the basis of 
what I know about chemistry, to devise a 
definite set of conditions which shall pro- 
duce the result that I desire, and when 
the result is once secured, there is nothing 
more to say. But what has been demon- 
strated is the fact that a certain proposed 
line of action really did accomplish what I 
expected of it. The scientist's problem is, 
however, an altogether different one. He 
does not want to get a particular result as 
an end, but he wants to show by this par- 
ticular result that something is already 
true of reality, even before the result 
takes place. 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 343 

If, then, we distinguish these two atti- 
tudes in regard to knowledge, we still 
need to bring them into a more intimate 
connection. We have already seen that, 
logically, knowing must be subordinated 
to doing, the intellectual must presup- 
pose the moral. None of our thinking 
simply ends in thinking; there would be 
no incentive for us to think over the 
facts which past experience has brought 
to us, except in the way of mere day- 
dreams, if we did not wish in some way 
to use this knowledge. There is no 
reason why I should take any interest 
in that which bears no relation whatever 
to my active life. Of what possible use 
could it be to me to know the facts of 
history, unless these had within them- 
selves the possibility of throwing light 
on my own duties as a citizen and a 
member of society } Even the aesthetic 
or romantic interest is not a purely pri- 
vate and subjectively intellectual affair; 
the artist certainly does not do just the 



344 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

same things, or live just the same Hfe, 
as his Philistine neighbor. The end of 
knowledge, then, and the only end that 
will justify or explain it, is to serve as 
an hypothesis, which, since it has to do 
with conduct, may be called a moral 
hypothesis. But this is so far from 
denying knowledge the right to possess, 
in a less ultimate sense, an interest on 
its own account, that, on the contrary, it 
directly implies it. I cannot form any 
hypothesis as to what I ought to do in 
a given situation, except on the basis of 
a knowledge of what the world is like in 
which my action has to be performed. 
And if I waited till I actually had to 
act before acquiring this knowledge, I 
should certainly be compelled to put up 
with an hypothesis that was unneces- 
sarily inadequate. Intellectual know- 
ledge, which is knowledge about matters 
of fact, is thus the absolute presupposi- 
tion of moral action, if this latter is to 
be intelligent; and for intellectual know- 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 345 

ledge to be an effective instrument when 
it is needed, it will have to be cultivated 
meanwhile on its own account. And, 
more than this, it is a presupposition, 
not in the sense that it is a necessary- 
means to an end which, once attained, 
can forthwith dispense with it, but, on 
the contrary, as itself the most impor- 
tant factor in this end. Just as soon as 
we get above the level of purely physical 
action, knowledge forms an absolutely 
essential part of that active experience 
in which life consists. It is just this 
which differentiates the spiritual from 
the animal — the presence in it of rational 
insight. Experience cannot satisfy us, 
except as we feel that we have got 
hold, in some fairly adequate measure, 
of the meaning of this experience in 
terms of all the world, and so in terms 
of knowledge. Consequently, while the 
distinction still remains valid, we find 
that it is impossible to make any real 
separation, after all, between action as 



346 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

a test for the validity of an hypothesis 
which is applied to a concrete practical 
or moral situation, and this same action 
as testing theoretically the knowledge on 
which our practical hypothesis is based. 
Since all experience which rises above 
the physical plane has to do with essen- 
tially similar facts to those with which 
a new moral situation is concerned, the 
ability on the part of our practical hy- 
pothesis to meet this particular situa- 
tion, by that very fact throws light 
upon the nature of reality. , It is 
through just such situations in the 
past — it is through life, in a word — that 
we have gained all the material that 
we possess for answering questions 
about reality at all ; and it is only by 
getting new experience, which of course 
is always in the form of particular situa- 
tions, that we can add to this know- 
ledge. On the other hand, our practical 
question is not answered, our practical 
need not met, except as the action which 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 347 

attempts to meet it helps also to clear 
up the intellectual statement of the 
world; for an action, as a rational ex- 
perience, only exists as it understands 
itself in terms of its relations to reality 
beyond it. In any definite act of life 
which has a spiritual value, it is im- 
possible to separate the use of the hy- 
pothesis as the means of reaching an 
immediate practical end, and the use of 
this result, in turn, as a test of the 
hypothesis regarded as an intellectual 
truth, for both these elements are for a 
rational being inseparably blended. 

A philosophical theory, then, is simply 
the systematization of such intellectual 
knowledge. It is the most consistent 
statement I am able to make as to what 
the nature of reality is like — a statement, 
however, which is made, not on its own 
account, but because I need the best 
knowledge I can get of the world in 
order to tell me how to do my duty in 
the world. And it is for this reason that 



348 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

absolute scepticism is impossible for a 
rational being. I may be sceptical about 
certain philosophies, but if I am to live 
in the world at all, and live as a rational 
being, some hypothesis I must have by 
which to direct my actions. Otherwise 
it is only an animal existence that I am 
living. It is, consequently, no mere re- 
sult of chance that our knowledge is only 
partial, and not in the form of a fully 
rounded system. It is impossible to get 
reality completely summed up in thought, 
if thought leads us to do something which 
thus changes reality. Not only Is our 
present thought not final, but the whole 
justification of thinking lies in the fact 
that it is not final, and that life still has 
something for us to do for which thought 
is a necessary preparation. Nothing, in- 
deed, could be more tedious and insipid 
than thought which leads to no new 
developments, which grinds over the 
same thing again and again, and is sim- 
ply itself indefinitely. And yet this is 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 349 

just what the goal of life would be, if the 
ideal were a state of perfect knowledge. 
In saying that truth represents at best 
a more or less probable hypothesis, which 
no conceivable circumstances would ever 
enable us to make logically complete, we 
are, it is true, abandoning an ideal which 
has been very widespread and very per- 
sistent. Nevertheless we may fairly ask 
what, after all, there is so enticing in the 
ideal of certainty, that we should hesi- 
tate to give it up .? Might not a life of 
certainty, indeed, be a rather stupid life } 
If truth is meant to furnish us with an 
hypothesis for action, why should we 
insist on being insured against all pos- 
sible mischance before we begin to act.? 
Is there not a charm also in the fact 
of risking something, of having the 
courage to venture, and to take the 
consequences } If, indeed, the ideal were 
perfect and complete knowledge, some- 
thing finished and done for, we might 
have some reason to complain. But if 



350 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

the zest of life is found in living, a 
finished state of knowledge would be 
no substitute for it. That we have to 
act upon a knowledge that is incomplete 
is no real hardship, if we get the essence 
of reality in our action, and not in know- 
ledge, except as this forms a part of 
action. If our share in a reality which 
is a never-ending process, consists in that 
which we contribute to the active work 
of the world, we do not want this pro- 
cess ever to end in a passive state of 
thought. There does not seem, then, 
to be any very strong reason why we 
should not be satisfied with the guide 
of probability, unless, indeed, we confuse 
the lack of logical certainty with the 
lack of practical conviction, and this 
there is no need of doing. Lack of 
logical demonstration does not mean a 
state of mind in which one thing seems 
as probable as another; it may be con- 
sistent with a high degree of conviction, 
even of moral certainty. We have not 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 3 5 1 

all our data, to be sure, but we have a vast 
amount of it already — the whole past 
experience of the race, — and in organiz- 
ing this, our criterion of intellectual con- 
sistency can be relied upon so far as it 
will go. And not only that, but we can 
test our theory by experiment, and this 
is what, as a matter of fact, we are con- 
stantly doing. Of course we cannot test 
it decisively by any single result in the 
outer world, as we might a scientific 
truth. A philosophical theory is formu- 
lated almost entirely in the intellectual 
realm, and there is no one particular act 
which can be sufficiently comprehensive 
to prove it. Since its basis is the whole 
past experience which the race has under- 
gone, no new experience in the next day 
or week is likely to throw any startlingly 
new light on the essential facts of human 
life, in such a way as to test, definitely 
and conclusively, a theory of life's mean- 
ing. Any single act is necessarily so 
limited in comparison with the total sum 



352 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

of reality, that it cannot possibly bring 
together elements sufficiently exhaustive 
to -prove or disprove a theory which 
takes in the universe. Nevertheless, just 
as action in the physical world can be 
used to test the scientific truth which 
deals with this world, so philosophy, 
which deals with life in its entirety, can 
be brought to the test of life. In other 
words, we come back to the common- 
place that we can find out the meaning 
of life only by living, not by merely 
reasoning about it. The co'nsistency of 
which we are in search is not the mere 
logical consistency of certain abstract 
truths, nor the consistency of scientific 
formulae simply, though these - are both 
a part of it; but it is the consistency 
which is demanded by our whole nature 
as life develops it, and so it is only 
life that can bring to light the data 
without which our intellectual solution 
will be nothing but a bare framework, 
logically correct perhaps, but absolutely 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 3 53 

inadequate. The youth whose experi- 
ence is limited cannot possibly, by mere 
intellectual gymnastics, reach the riper 
insight of the man ; he may echo the 
same formulae, and may see how logi- 
cally they are arrived at, but they do 
not mean the same to him. And since 
living is more comprehensive a thing 
than any particular phase within it, we 
cannot, as we have seen, test a theory 
which has to do with life in its com- 
pleteness, except by a process which is 
slower and less definitely formulated 
than the one we use for minor beliefs. 
But yet this process is no less real. 
What is the ultimate test of a philo- 
sophical theory } Simply its ability to 
harmonize all the elements of life — in- 
tellectual, emotional, and practical — in the 
progressive experience of living, as the 
test of a scientific theory is its ability to 
harmonize that part of life which is 
made up of our relation to the physical 
world. For each individual, that test is 



354 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

his whole life experience ; for the race, 
it is that vaguer process through which 
beliefs which fail to satisfy the demands 
of life are weeded out, and more ade- 
quate conceptions take their place. Of 
course this makes the work of testing 
truth far more slow and tedious than our 
impatient desires can rest satisfied with, 
and we have constantly the attempt to 
find some shorter cut, which shall enable 
us to get demonstration here and now. 
But we have only to Icfok back over the 
history of thought to see that it is pre- 
cisely demonstration which, in the long 
run, is farthest off from demonstrating; 
whether we are willing or not, in reality 
the search for truth is a long and a slow 
one. Of course this is not saying that 
there is nothing for us to do but fold 
our hands and wait, or that, until some 
far-off issue is reached, all things are 
alike possible. We have already a large 
amount of experience back of us to 
form our conclusions on, and a thing 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 355 

may haVe any degree of probability, ac- 
cording as it meets the test of consist- 
ency with these facts already known. 
It is only demonstration, absolute cer- 
tainty, that we must do without ; and in 
so far as intellectual reasoning fails to 
reach results which command the uni- 
versal acceptance of mankind, it is only 
to time and added experience that we 
can look, not indeed even now for logi- 
cal certainty, but for an ever-growing 
agreement and strength of conviction. 

And we may reply in a similar way 
to the objection that the incompleteness 
of knowledge makes it impossible that 
it should satisfy us ; if knowledge is, and 
must be, incomplete, then not only can 
we never be certain that it is true, but 
we can say positively that it is not true, 
since the facts which it fails to include 
would necessarily modify it. But because 
knowledge fails to be complete, it does 
not therefore follow that it may not be 
true essentially, and adequate to our pur- 



356 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

pose. There are two conceptions here 
which we should distinguish. A theory 
may be inadequate because, while it ac- 
counts for a certain number of facts, 
there are other facts for which it finds 
no room ; and such a theory must give 
place, as knowledge grows, to one that 
is more comprehensive, as the Ptolemaic 
system gave place to the Copernican. 
Or, on the other hand, a theory may be 
correct in general outline, and capable 
of admitting new facts as they come to 
light without changing its essential nat- 
ure; and then we have no hesitation in 
calling the theory true, even though we 
admit that the truth is of a kind which 
is formal rather than real, and that it 
never will outgrow the need of a con- 
tinual modification in detail, as its ab- 
stract correctness comes to be applied 
to facts, and to take up a concrete fill- 
ing. If the best understanding we can 
get of life is so utterly inadequate, that 
we are compelled to say that, from the 



Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 357 

standpoint of reality as a whole, the 
essence of the thing would take on a 
shape which is utterly unlike anything 
we know, then indeed we might be ex- 
cused for feeling that our appearance of 
knowledge is a cheat and a delusion. 
But we do not need to hold this. We 
may fairly demand, and in the hope 
of some day finding our demand real- 
ized, that the theory which we accept as 
true should, at least in outline, represent 
the ultimate truth, without going beyond 
such insight as the nature of our own 
lives may render us capable of under- 
standing. A profounder knowledge, then, 
would not result in making this less 
real, but more so; it would transform it 
only by filling it out, by making it con- 
crete, and adding to it in value and ap- 
preciation. We have no need to exalt 
our own experience, or to deny that it 
comes immeasurably short of realizing 
the full richness of the world. But this 
more ultimate reality is not therefore a 



358 Scepticism and Criterion of Truth 

thing unknown and mysterious, but the 
same active, conscious Hfe of social values, 
raised to a vastly higher power. In its 
essential nature our theory may be true, 
but it is not the whole truth, simply 
because reality is not theory, but life. 
For any truth that is vital, that is more 
than a bare intellectual outline, we must 
go to life itself, and to the ever-increasing 
wealth of meaning which is revealing 
itself in the history of mankind. 



INDEX 



Absolute, Hegel's, 170, 185, 
191, 198, 205, 208, 217. 

Activity, conscious, 240-242, 
290-292, 350. 

Agnosticism, 151, 155, 224- 
233, 249-264, 268. 

Arnold, Matthew, 7. 

Berkeley, 79, 88, 91, 108, 113, 
243, 268, 270. 

Categories, 170, 181-184, 195. 
Causation, 35-39, 48-51. 53. 

55, 61, 71-73, 110-112, 113, 

125, 142, 145, 154, 159, 235, 

278, 323. 
Change, 27, 33, 45, 46. 
Concepts, 93-99, 171, 173, 

243. 336, 339. 
Consciousness, nature of, 69- 

71, 119, 150, 152, 169, 187, 

193. 239- 
Consciousness, origin of, 67, 

70. 
Cosmology, 18, 53. 

Descartes, 25. 
Design, see Teleology. 
Development, 176, 189, 196, 

222. 
Dialectic, Hegel's, 172, 180. 
Dualism, 23 ff. 

Empiricism, 97, 106, 122, 136. 



Energy, Conservation of, 37, 

300. 
Epistemology, 18, 88-92, 113, 

123, 138, 155, 202, 233-248, 

255-257. 

Evolution, 66, 208, 309. 

Experience, see Conscious- 
ness. 

Experiment, 327-334, 351. 

Explanation, 325. 

Feeling and thought, 12-14. 

First Cause, 54. 

Force, 72, no, 183, 223, 279. 

God, existence of, see The- 
ism and Pantheism. 

Hegel, 159-217, 221, 268. 
Hume, 29, 89, 108 if., 136, 295. 

Idealism, objective, 156, 234. 
Idealism, subjective, 75-84, 

88, 234, 236. 
Idealism, theistic, 267-311. 
Ideas, see Concepts, 
Inference, 318. 
Innate ideas, 100. 
Interaction, see Causation. 

Judgment, 256. 

Kant, 132-156, 159, 164, 170. 
179, 191, 201, 232, 249-256. 



359 



360 



Index 



Knowledge, see Episte- 
mology. 

Locke, 30. 
Logic, 322. 

Materialism, 62-76, 87, 260. 
Mathematics, 99, 133-13S, 

137- 
Matter, 26, 34, 52, 73-75, 76- 

79. 223. 
Matter, creation of, 51. 
Mechanism and teleology, 

see Teleology. 
Memory, 244, 248. 
Metaphysics, 19-20, 23, 134. 
Mind, see Soul. 
Mind and body, relation of, 

34 ff., 43-44, 300-311. 
Monism, 40, 302-306. 

Necessary truths, 101-107, 

110-112, 136, 320. 
Necessity, iii, 124, 134, 136, 

140-145, 153. 
Nominalists, 96. 

Objective world, 15, 90, 113, 
122, 147, 193, 201, 203, 
235 ff., 249, 252, 270 ff. 

Ontology, 16. 

Pantheism, 39-49, 62, 210, 

282-290, 302-306. 
Parallelism, 43, 300-311. 
Personality, see Self. 
Phenomenalism, 40, 47, 

221 ff., 302-306. 
Philosophy, definition, 2. 
Philosophy and science, see 

Science. 
Plato, 93, 241. 
Positivism, 7-10, 226 fif. 
Proof, 317 ff. 



H 14 



Psychology, n8-i2i, 193. 
Purpose, see Teleology. 

Qualities, 28. 

Rationalism 89-125, 130, 151, 
Realists, 96. 

Relativity of knowledge, 259- 
264. 

Scepticism, 227, 316, 337, 348. 
Science and philosophy, 7- 

II, 63-65, 227-230, 
Self, the, 29, 108, 121, 144, 

148, 150, 164-166, 168-170, 

187, 198, 202, 206 ff., 254, 

281, 291-300. 
Sensationalism, 89-125, 130, 

146, 236-248. 
Sensations, 95, 120, 188, 239, 

242, 262. 
Sociology, 204. 
Socrates, 93. 
Solipsism, 113, 199, 203. 
Soul, the, 26, 29-33, 34, 108, 

296-300. 
Space, 52, 142, 253. 
Spinoza, 44, 301. 
Substance and attributes, 26- 

33. 42-45. 78, 142, 144, 223, 

272. 

Teleology, 53-58, 241, 273, 

306-311. 
Theism, 39, 49-58, 62, 267- 

311- 
'Thing,' nature of a, 26-30, 

182, 273-278. 
Thought, function of, 334, 

343- 
Time, 142, 253. 

Will, 280, 282. 






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